I mispell things!
the story – on it’s way back from the bahamas a norwegian cruise lines’ ship was struck by a freak 70 foot wave injuring four passengers and flooding 62 cabins with a foot of water. the ship docked in charleston, south carolina where 300 passengers decided to fly back home while 2,000 jumped back on the ship.
i think i would have been one of the 300.
april 21-23 the red stick animation festival will happen and the terrell family will be right in the midst of it. since pam is an l.s.u. we get free tickets to allot of cool stuff. we’ll get to see screenings of the incredibles, shrek, shrek ii, spirited away and several other animated features in the imax format. it should be an incredible weekend.
i know i predicted this yesterday but i figured i would go ahead and make it official since the game last night … i got second in our “march madness” bracket competition with sparks getting first place by 1 point. here are the results:
i figured i would calm all of you who have been worried about how i was doing in my march madness bracket. my come back from 7th placed started this past weekend and i have good news and bad news to report. the good news is that i did dramatically pull up in the rankings. the bad news is that i will miss winning the bracket for the first time in three years. no matter who wins tonight (hopefully north carolina will win) sparks will beat me for the lead by ONE POINT. thus i will end in second place. so close yet so far away.
so sparks where do you want to go eat?
i know that some of you have been worried about my standing in our student ministry march madness bracket competition (wow that’s a mouthful). you’ve probably been having sleepless nights and anxiety attacks over the fact that i was second from the last. free not my friends. i have slowly started my climb back to the top. i’m presently ranked 6th out of 9 participants (an improvement of two spots) and my outlook is looking good. i feel a rally coming.
for those who are curious here are the present ranks (the ranks are below the white space – which i don’t understand why it is there i must have coded something wrong but i can’t figure it out. if you figure it out please email me or comment and tell me what to fix because it really bugs me. otherwise you can just use the white space to doodle on. go ahead. pick up a sharpie and draw something in the white space. do it right now.):
| name | score | correct | best score | best correct |
| eddie hirst | 212 | 34 | 247 | 36 |
| stephen miller | 206 | 35 | 220 | 36 |
| sam jones | 202 | 34 | 237 | 36 |
| stephen ware | 202 | 33 | 237 | 35 |
| steven sparks | 200 | 35 | 249 | 38 |
| me | 199 | 34 | 248 | 37 |
| kevin lee | 189 | 34 | 189 | 34 |
| alan lusk | 170 | 31 | 219 | 34 |
| blake wallace | 168 | 31 | 168 | 31 |
what in the world is going on with march madness? my bracket has gone bezzerk. thanks allot l.s.u., connecticut, boston college, wake forest, kansas, syracuse, gonzaga, and oklahoma. basketball is a nice round ball and therefore should be easier to predict but NO! i’m presently at the bottom side of our little bracket competition and that’s not the way that it’s supposed to be.
previously i posted some links to tsunami videos that were amazing. unfortunately everyone else thought they were amazing also and crashed the site that was hosting them. so here’s a post with a few new videos of the tsunami that are up for now.
if i find more later i will post them again. there is some absolutely amazing footage out there.
you’ve got to read this:
An Indonesian man has been found floating on tree branches in the Indian Ocean, eight days after a devastating tsunami struck the region. Rizal Shahputra, 23, said he was initially swept out to sea with other survivors and family members, but that one by one they drowned.
He was rescued on Monday by a passing container vessel. He was taken to Malaysia where officials said he was in good condition – he survived eating floating coconuts.
Rizal said he was cleaning a mosque in Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra on 26 December when the tsunami struck. Children ran in to warn him, but he was swept out to sea, along with several other people.
“At first, there were some friends with me,” Rizal told reporters. “After a few days, they were gone… I saw bodies left and right.”
He drank rainwater, and ate coconuts, which he reportedly cracked open with a doorknob.
Rizal said at least one ship sailed by without noticing him before the MV Durban Bridge spotted him, 160km (100 miles) from Banda Aceh.
Huang Wen Feng, a crew member of the ship, said he was “very, very surprised” to see Rizal standing on his wood debris on Monday. “He was shouting at us. I couldn’t believe it,” he said.
The Japanese-owned ship, which was returning to Malaysia from South Africa, took Rizal to the Malaysian port of Port Klang, where he arrived on Wednesday.
He was taken to hospital, weak and in shock, and having sustained some cuts to his legs.
His survival follows that of a woman, also from Aceh, who was found in the sea on Friday. She had fish bites to her legs, and had survived on fruit from the palm tree she was clinging to.
here are a few links on the asian tsunami. some of interest and some for purposes of helping.
consider helping in any way you can.
happy reformation day aka happy all saints eve aka happy halloween.
as most of your know tonight was halloween and you may not know this but alot of people like to dress up in costumes and go from house to house begging for candy. it’s an odd custom but people seem to love it. as a kid my family and i loved halloween. each year we would convert our house into the best house in the neighborhood to get candy from. we created a dummy that we would hang with a noose from the biggest tree in our front yard (btw, the dummy was not my dad – HA). our yard was littered with graves bearing dressed up mummies, vampires, and various other ghouls which would come to life whenever anyone passed by them. then we would take our stereos and play sound scary sound effects out of our windows. when i was a kid i was convinced that it was the scariest thing the world had ever seen.
of course, that was looking through the eyes of a kid which also seem to make things bigger and better than they actually are.
when i was in high school at northview high school we had several places that we were convinced were incredibly scary. one of those places was the “witch’s grave.” this was a a tree that had a hole in it and inside that hole were the supposed remains of the witch. the “mythology” around the tree/grave was that hundreds of years ago a witch had been killed and buried in the hole of the tree. her skull was still supposed to be in the tree and if you were truly brave you could reach into the hole of the tree and touch the skull of the witch. of course, it was actually just a dog skull or something similar. it was truly scary when i was 16 years old and it was midnight. so everyone and their momma would drive over the the farmer’s property where the witch’s grave was found and then reached into the dark hole to touch the skull. it was incredibly chilling at the time.
it was even more frightening since the only time i went to the “witch’s grave” we were chased away by the owner of the property. we went to the tree and jumped out to go touch the skull. as we were convincing each other to touch the skull the farmer came out of his house and started screaming for us to leave. if we hadn’t of been convinced by his screaming we were definitely move to action by the shotgun in his hands. the deciding factor was when he shot the gun off in the air. we hoped in our vehicles and got out of their as fast as possible. i’m not sure how scary the “witch’s grave” actually was but i know for a fact that the shot gun was very frightening.
