alackofadhesiveducks

My near death experience, which perhaps didn't bring about any dramatic behavior changes, but cool enough in its own right.

It's the night of my 18th birthday, though not quite midnight so I'm still caught in the age of seventeen. I'm at Roanoke College, and me and some friends are running about between parties, looking for a great time and not really finding it. Or maybe we were, but I'm pretty biased about my whole experience at the college, so I'll never really clearly remember. But I do remember this, with absolutely vivid recollection;
We're at a street, getting ready to cross; someone in our group hurries across the street. Trusting his judgement, assuming he would not try to cross the street with oncoming traffic, I step out to make my way across without looking both ways. And, of course, there is a car, and it's going really fast, at least forty, and at the very last second of its passing, a clutch timing survival reflex that had somehow been latent for all of my sedentary white upper-middle class life rears its head when it is most needed, and I contort my entire body into a curved "C" shape around the contours of the blur of the automobile as it passed by me in the darkness, my face inches from the top ridge of the frame, the side view mirror grazing my belt and shirt as it made its way along.
And, after making it across the street into the back of my friend's car, I loudly recited a fight club quote that was absolutely god damn perfect for the situation, but no one had even seen the bloody movie much less read the book, so I just looked like an idiot. The end.

March 22nd Spring Break No Class

March 29th Review Chapter 7, 18, Quiz and Discussion

April 5th- Profiles due, peer edits in class

April 5th Chapter 13, 20 Quiz + Discussion

April 5th Chapter 13, do exercise 4






The middle brother, on my right, has his eyes fixed on the casket. Or maybe the flowers surrounding the casket, I can't really tell. There's sorrow in his eyes, more than I would come to expect from him, but certainly enough for the occasion. His hands are fidgeting as well, of course not nearly as much as the boy, but he's well into his years and should have this sort of thing under control at this point. Their ties are matching; him and the boy I mean, both a formal red.
Maybe the boy's father dressed him, too. Both of them, fidgeting and eager and maybe a little bit sorrowful. I really would have liked that furthest seat.
The organ player sits down, stretches his knuckles, and sets to work on the keys. That was her favorite part of church, she made that rather obvious, so the three of us made sure to have a decent organ player for her service. The player's hands have barely rolled over a dozen keys, and middle brother has already covered his face in his fingers, giving tears to the crevices of his sweaty palms. I can't even look past middle brother at right brother. My eyes don't let me, and I don't care to fight them. I'm sure he's found a shoulder sturdy enough to cry on, because his wife certainly isn't here. Speeches, eulogies, an hour or so passes, a few glances at my watch, and the funeral is over.


Hours later, I'm back under te

Weekly Blog Post: "Miracle Baby undergoes Hypothermia, Cheats Death"

http://www.aolnews.com/science/article/miracle-baby-bronson-staker-undergoes-hypothermia-to-cheat-death/19397097

"Miracle Baby Undergoes Hypothermia, Cheats Death"

I originally intended to write about Obama's new health care plan, but knowing really nothing about it, I decided to not make a fool of myself.

To summarize the story, an unattended child drowns in a bathtub. CPR efforts by the mother fail, and he is pronounced dead at the hospital. That particular part of this story caught my attention; the idea of pronouncing someone as "dead", especially when it turned out to be a less-than-final verdict. A medical technique called therapeutic hypothermia was called into play as a last effort to save the boy's life. It involves placing the patient under an induced coma, significantly lowering his body temperature, and then, over an extended period of time, brought back to a normal state through a very gradual rise in body temperature. The idea behind it is that when oxygen rushes back to a human brain that has lost circulation, cells in the brain are overwhelmed and are often permanently damaged. Damage is avoided through this technique.

What makes this story special is that the boy has made a nearly full recovery; most patients, if they wake up at all, come back into the world with damaged cognitive function.

Now, what makes this story interesting, at least to me, is the very human concept of what is dead, and what is not. The idea of when a human is dead beyond any medical effort on our part, and when is actually unavoidably passed on, seems limited only by the human knowledge of medical science. And the ceiling for medical science seems pretty high; we're researching how to grow functional human organs- at what point will we be able to synthesize entire human bodies and simply transport the human conscience from one body to another? If, or when, that does indeed happen, it'll surely destroy any concept of religion or God or any of that.

Things will be a lot less romantic, I think. But having a new body any time I need it, and just the general idea of immortality; I can deal with that.

I am in the suite living room. Six of my friends are roaming around throughout various parts of the room. One of my suitemates is wandering around the kitchen, making a meal. Smells of cooking meat emanate from the kitchen, and battle with the smell of a freshly vacuumed carpet. A suitemate sits behind me, typing away on his laptop, with the sound from a computer game in the background. Another suitemate sits adjacent to me, flipping through channels on the massive fifty-five inch LCD television. I can hear someone else slamming on their practice drum kit in the other room, with the rumble of the bass drum particularly audible through the wall. My eyes are squinting from the sunlight through the balcony glass door. A draft of cold air reaches my skin from another room, or perhaps from under the doorway of somewhere else.

There’s a lot of idle chatter passing back and forward. I’m not really paying attention to any of it, as most of it seems casual and hardly private. I hear someone playing with the stove, turning over the cooking meat as it browns. The channel changes once more, and I hit my fingers on the keyboard for the final few sentences.

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/02/28/how-to-stop-phishermen-from-catching/?icid=mainmaindl6link3http%3A%2F%2Fwww.walletpop.com%2Fblog%2F2010%2F02%2F28%2Fhow-to-stop-phishermen-from-catching%2F

"How to stop phishermen from catching" by Jennie L Phipps

This is a fun little "edgy" technology story. Except it's not so much as "edgy" as it is "devoid of any real meaningful content or information", which is particularly embarassing for a piece on a subject matter that has been so wildly explored and over-publicized as much as this has. Having been on the internet for more than 3 years would qualify, really, just about anyone to write this up. The lost Prince of Nigeria isn't really who he says he is, and I shouldn't wire-transfer to him a thousand dollars so that he can reclaim his kingdom?

My favorite part in particular;

"Yoder says the attackers used to be pimply faced 14-year-olds trying to prove how smart they were, but today's phisherman is a full-fledged crook, probably based in an Eastern European country and expert at avoiding or paying off law enforcement."

Good to see the facts straight from the man himself, a fairly irrelevant vice president of engineering in a fairly irrelevant internet security firm. And by facts, I mean vague illusions to stereotypes of characters from crime dramas. Maybe one day, Horatio Crane will finally run down the Prince of Nigeria. In either case, I should probably never go to AOL.com again.