July 28, 2010
Extra-ordinary
have you ever thought much about the word “extraordinary”? It’s synonymous with super, amazing and fantastic.
So why is it that when you break it down, you get extra and ordinary. extra means plenty of, even more than you need. And ordinary means normal, samesame, nothing different.
In that case, if you put the two together, you’d think that it meant superunchanging, veryveryregular.
well, that’s what I think, anyways.
So have yourself an extraordinary day, regardless the definition.
April 22, 2010
Earth Day
If any of you have visited Google at any point in time today, you’ll have noticed that something’s up. The bright green, jungleish square in the middle of the page sure gets you’re attention.
That’s because today’s the day we celebrate the huge spherical chunk of rock and dirt that we all live on, the Earth.
But, not only is it a day to thank the earth for being around, it’s to raise awareness that if we want to keep it around, we’re going to have to make some changes.
I know most of you have probably heard the Go Green speech a couple times already. But that’s the point! It must be drilled into your head until you can recite all the facts along with any speaker. And I must help with that.
First of all, don’t keep anything that uses electricity running when you don’t need it. Lights, video games, TV, your electric piano, whatever. That electricity is being wasted when it could’ve been used for other things. Instead, they’ll just have to make more, ommiting gases into the atmosphere and using precious resources.
Also, try to keep car usage to a minimum because that grey smoky stuff that comes out the back is seriously not good for the environement. Instead, bike or walk, skip or pogo, something else that is you-powered. There’s also a plus coming out of this: you’re going to be a supertank, fit person if you keep it up.
Recycle! You don’t want the dumps overflowing with stuff that could have been turned into something else. That could be heavy on your consience to know you helped with that. An easy way out is the afore-mentioned recycling. Instead of tossing a water bottle – oh, thought! using a reusable water bottle makes it even better. You can get them in cool colours too, not just transparent – in the trash, aim for a recycling bin!
Little things that everyone - and I mean everyone. Don’t think that someone else in the world will do it for you – does are ways to save the planet and show we care.
April 6, 2010
MLIA
I’m sure a lot of you have heard of the website MLIA, an acronym for the words My Life Is Average. It is a site where people post random and most likely funny things that happen to them or that they think of. Of course, they can’t just post it right off the bat, the website keeps all posts at a high standard. People vote on each one and once it’s acquired enough, it will be publicly displaying.
I have tried countless times to actually get something published but it is a long a slow process that takes time. Today, I checked and had one story published! many people commented on it and I felt like I was going to explode with pride.
Here it is for you:
Today, I found out that table salt is made when you mix sodium and chlorine (sodium chloride), two poisonous substances on their own. My question is: who mixed them together and ate it? MLIA
Funny? I hope you think so.
Anyways, I just had to share this moment with you 
March 30, 2010
Next…with Rick Riordan
We’ve already touched on the subject of Percy Jackson and just how awesome he and the books are. But, if we dig a little deeper, we may find something else. The author! Yes, the wonderful man who has created this wonderful series (see how they go together?) is moving on and doing other things!
Firstly, we shall delve into Percy Jackson once more. For those of you who do not know, the last book ended with a new Great Prophecy. I won’t say what it was just because I’m nice and don’t want to spoil it for you guys. But anyways, you can’t just leave a cliffhanger ending like that and not do something about it. That is why he is continueing in another series. It’s slightly hard to explain, but he’s making another series using camp-halfblood and all that, but Percy’s not the main character anymore. He’s aged and there will be new hero’s to save the day. Anyways, I am extremely excited, as should you be, about the first book.
But Rick here has been keeping it all under wraps. No one knows the title, cover art or release date for this new book. All I know for sure is that he’s done his first manuscript and has shipped it off to his editor who shall devour it with red pen. It’s tentatively set to come out in Fall.
And that’s not all our awesome author (hey, an alliteration!) has been up to. For he has created another book series also structured around ancient gods brought into the modern world. This time with egyptian gods. You know, like Ra and all those guys with animal heads. We do know facts about this book. For instance, the whole series is called ‘The Kane Chronicles’. The first books is to be entitled ‘The Red Pyramid’. The release date is May 4th, which just happens to be 4 days before my birthday, guess what’s on my wishlist!
- The Red Pyramid
So the dates to look out for are May 4th and somtime in the fall. It’s a bummer books take so long to publish!
March 25, 2010
Obscure Holidays
I don’t know if you know it, but practically everyday is a holiday. That is, except November 24th. No holiday is known to take place then. Of course, they’re not celebrated as much as our regular holidays (Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s…) but that doesn’t make them any less existent.
Today, for example, is Waffle Day and also Pecan Day. Some things suggested to do to celebrate these wonderful things is maybe to eat some waffles with as many toppings as possible, or just a bowl full of pecans in the fastest time possible. Maybe you could eat a pecan covered waffle as well as a waffle covered pecan! Take a poll to see whether people pronounce pecans ‘pee-cans’ or ‘puh-cauns’. There are millions of things to do!
Some of these days can be quite droll, such as ‘Sneak some Zucchini onto your Neighbor’s Porch Day’ where you actually go put a zucchini on their porch and ‘You’re Welcome Day’, which is the day after Thanksgiving so it’s like: Thank you, You’re welcome. Others celebrate people or accomplishments or are just about facts, like the recently passed Pi Day.
You can look them up and wish people a happy _______ day. I actually sent out electronic greeting cards on, you guessed it, ‘Electronic Greeting Card Day’
So, join in the fun a celebrate everyday!
March 16, 2010
Percy Jackson
I don’t know if you’ve heard of them, but Percy Jackson and the Olympians is an amazing book series. Author Rick Riordan has taken boring old Greek Mythology and put a modern new spin on it. There’s 5 books, The Lightning Thief, The Sea of Monsters, The Titans’s Curse, The Battle of the Labyrinth and The Last Olympian.
Percy Jackson, the main character, learns that he is a demi-god and has all these adventures with his new friends. A demi-god, for those of you who did not figure it out, is a person that is half god, half human. So one parent is a normal, everyday person but the other is Zeus or Aphrodite or something.
The above summary sounded really cheesy and that is not the way I’d like to portray the books so I’ll try again. Percy Jackson was thought to be a troubled kid; dyslexia, ADHD, and always getting in trouble. Little did he know that these characteristics basically meant he was a demi-god. The dyslexia because his brain was better at reading Ancient Greek, ADHD for quick reflexes in battle and the trouble came from monsters, totally not his fault. After a near-death experience with his algebra teacher, Percy finds out the truth about his past. His mother and his not-quite-human friend, Grover, take him to Camp Half-Blood, a place where demi-gods are truly safe. There he finds his parentage (surprise, your dad’s Posiedon!) and some new buddies. (Grover, the satyr – top half human, bottom half goat – and Annabeth – a clever daughter of Athena.)
That’s the beginning. In each book, he goes off on another adventure, following a prophecy but the whole series revolves around another big prophecy, correctly dubbed ‘The Great Prophecy’.
I won’t ruin it and tell you every single little detail because that would drain all the fun out of reading it. Actually, let me rephrase that. That would drain all the surprises, not the fun. You see, Rick Riordan is a pretty stupendous writer. You’re at the edge of your seat whislt reading the intense fight scenes and I’ve actually LOLed at a funny bit. Trust me, saying that means a lot in my world because I take LOL very seriously. It cannot be used freely.
For all you guys know, I could be a crazy lady that lives alone with my 47 cats and whose taste in books is questionable. Fear no longer. The first book was made into a movie and was a huge success.
Perhaps you’ve watched it. Let me tell you first, it’s nothing like. Ok, they have the main characters and a loose, shaky version of the plot but everything else is different. They don’t even mention Ares, Kronos, Dionysus and Clarisse, a couple key people in the book and Annabeth doesn’t look like she’s supposed to. The effects are crazy good but that won’t make up for their obvious lack of adaption from book to screen. I could go on and on about the differences but I’ll save that for another post.
Also coming soon is the word for what’s next with Percy and his author.
March 15, 2010
Owl City
I love Owl City. It is a band made up of one person. His name is Adam Young and he thought it’d be more interesting of he had a band name, so voila.
Adam’s music doesn’t sound like any instrument could make those sounds because he uses a computer for them.
He first became famous when his hit “Fireflies” topped charts and people became interested but he’d been making songs and albums on his own a while before.
His albums so far are ‘Of June’, ‘Maybe I’m Dreaming’ (both self-published) and Ocean Eyes.
Ocean Eyes
My favourites of his songs are: Fireflies, Bird and the Worm, Cave in, If my Heart was a House, Fuzzy Blue Lights, Strawberry Avalanche, Vanilla Twilight, The Technicolour Phase (featured in the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack!), This is the Future, Christmas song and so on and so forth until we’ve named all of Adam’s songs.
March 14, 2010
Pi
Pi
I just wanted to wish you all a happy Pi Day.
Pi is this magical number in math that has something to do with calculating area/circumference/volume of circular/spherical shapes. It is incredibly long, over 100000 decimal places, at least. On a calculator it is known as 3.14159265 but it is more commonly reffered to as 3.14.
That is why today is Pi day. The 14th of the 3rd month.
Have a great Pi Day!
March 12, 2010
Sports
This past week has been a very sporty week. So, I shall therefore talk about sports.I really love anything athletic. As mentioned before, I love track (or anything running), football (probably only for the running and chasing people down part) and badminton (’cause I’m good at it.)
This year, so far, I have gotten on the basketball team and improved tremendously on my skills. I started out being benched for most games but actually got to play quite a lot once the coaches discovered my defence skills.
At the moment, I am on both the badminton team (as a doubles player but I desperately want to be singles), the track team (doing short distance sprints) and signed up for the football team.
To boot, this afternoon, my gym class hopped on a bus and went bowling! It was terribly fun. Except for the bus part, I detest buses. We played two games of 5-pin bowling and I won both with scores of 108 and 92 plus 3 strikes under my belt.
Also, later on this upcoming week (which just happens to be march break — no school!!), I’m going to go skiing for the second time in my entire life.So, all the above considered, I’m pretty good with most sports. Except soccer. My coordination of running with a ball is limited. It also happens to be the only sport my sister is good at.
Be ready for crazy, random, spontaneous blogs next week, for I will be puttering around at home with nothing of interest happening and will have to really on my imagination for topics to write about.
You have been warned.
March 11, 2010
Movie Day!
and that’s what today basically was. This morning, after badminton practice, my English class got to watch ‘She’s the Man’ because it was based on the Shakespeare play we’re studying. I understood the story line much betterly watching this.
I’ll try to explain for those of you who have not heard of either the movie or the play. This guy named Orsino (or Duke Orsino in the movie because being called Orsino nowadays is weird) is in love with a girl named Olivia. The problem is, Olivia has her eyes on Sebastien who is actually only Sebastien’s twin sister posing as Sebastien whilst the real one is playing with his band over in London. The only reason she is doing this is not to cover up for him because she’s a nice sister, her soccer team was cut from her school so she wanted to play against the guys from their rival school, Illyria. She is also crushing on Duke. pretty confusing, but the makings of a good plot.
One period after that, my Geography class left to see ‘Oscar et la Dame Rose’, that movie the book was based on. You’ll never guess how empty a movie theatre is in the middle of the day. We were the only ones not only watching that movie but in the whole place, aside from the staff there.
The book and movie are about a young boy with terminal cancer. An older lady that volunteers at the hospital befriends him and they get to know each other well. Since he knows he’s dying and won’t get to grow up, she suggests that he pretend to age 10 years each day. She also introduced him to God and got him to write letters to him telling him that he could tell him anything. At the end, he does die. It was really amazing, they hardly changed anything, thankfully, but it didn’t make me cry like when I read the book.
Speaking of movies, I am thoroughly obsessed with the books a movie that just recently came out is based on. Percy Jackson and the Olympians. It is quite phenomenal. I shall have to devote a whole blog to it sometime in the near future when nothing of interest is happening in my life.
