alex sing more agressive on divine.

layer all vocals.

thats all.

living is easy is the best one.

Is everything spinning out of control?

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.

The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country’s sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

The sense of helplessness is even reflected in this year’s presidential election. Each contender offers a sense of order — and hope. Republican John McCain promises an experienced hand in a frightening time. Democrat Barack Obama promises bright and shiny change, and his large crowds believe his exhortation, “Yes, we can.”

Even so, a battered public seems discouraged by the onslaught of dispiriting things. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll says a barrel-scraping 17 percent of people surveyed believe the country is moving in the right direction. That is the lowest reading since the survey began in 2003.

An ABC News-Washington Post survey put that figure at 14 percent, tying the low in more than three decades of taking soundings on the national mood.

“It is pretty scary,” said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester, Minn. “People are thinking things are going to get better, and they haven’t been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about things, you have very little power to make it change.”

Recent natural disasters around the world dwarf anything afflicting the U.S. Consider that more than 69,000 people died in the China earthquake, and that 78,000 were killed and 56,000 missing from the Myanmar cyclone.

Americans need do no more than check the weather, look in their wallets or turn on the news for their daily reality check on a world gone haywire.

Floods engulf Midwestern river towns. Is it global warming, the gradual degradation of a planet’s weather that man seems powerless to stop or just a freakish late-spring deluge?

It hardly matters to those in the path. Just ask the people of New Orleans who survived Hurricane Katrina. They are living in a city where, 1,000 days after the storm, entire neighborhoods remain abandoned, a national embarrassment that evokes disbelief from visitors.

Food is becoming scarcer and more expensive on a worldwide scale, due to increased consumption in growing countries such as China and India and rising fuel costs. That can-do solution to energy needs — turning corn into fuel — is sapping fields of plenty once devoted to crops that people need to eat. Shortages have sparked riots. In the U.S., rice prices tripled and some stores rationed the staple.

Residents of the nation’s capital and its suburbs repeatedly lose power for extended periods as mere thunderstorms rumble through. In California, leaders warn people to use less water in the unrelenting drought.

Want to get away from it all? The weak U.S. dollar makes travel abroad forbiddingly expensive. To add insult to injury, some airlines now charge to check luggage.

Want to escape on the couch? A writers’ strike halted favorite TV shows for half a season. The newspaper on the table may soon be a relic of the Internet age. Just as video stores are falling by the wayside as people get their movies online or in the mail.

But there’s always sports, right?

The moorings seem to be coming loose here, too.

Baseball stars Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens stand accused of enhancing their heroics with drugs. Basketball referees are suspected of cheating.

Stay tuned for less than pristine tales from the drug-addled Tour de France and who knows what from the Summer Olympics.

It’s not the first time Americans have felt a loss of control.

Alger, the dime-novel author whose heroes overcame adversity to gain riches and fame, played to similar anxieties when the U.S. was becoming an industrial society in the late 1800s.

American University historian Allan J. Lichtman notes that the U.S. has endured comparable periods and worse, including the economic stagflation (stagnant growth combined with inflation) and Iran hostage crisis of 1980; the dawn of the Cold War, the Korean War and the hysterical hunts for domestic Communists in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and the Depression of the 1930s.

“All those periods were followed by much more optimistic periods in which the American people had their confidence restored,” he said. “Of course, that doesn’t mean it will happen again.”

Each period also was followed by a change in the party controlling the White House.

This period has seen intense interest in the presidential primaries, especially the Democrats’ five-month duel between Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Records were shattered by voters showing up at polling places, yearning for a voice in who will next guide the country as it confronts the uncontrollable.

Never mind that their views of their current leaders are near rock bottom, reflecting a frustration with Washington’s inability to solve anything. President Bush barely gets the approval of three in 10 people, and it’s even worse for the Democratic-led Congress.

Why the vulnerability? After all, this is the 21st century, not a more primitive past when little in life was assured. Surely people know how to fix problems now.

Maybe. And maybe this is what the 21st century will be about — a great unraveling of some things long taken for granted.

quoted from AP

e

Im bored so I’m going to go through my twitter pics and explain them in more than just the standard 140 character limit.

This is my dad and my mom, sitting in the front seat of the car while i was in florida on our way to meet my grandparents for dinner.  This was an interesting car ride, tensions ran high.  The other thing to note is that this car permanently stays in FL.  I have probably only been in this car a handfull of times, its a Honda CRV.  its kinda like a civic onstilts and reversed engineered to look “cute”.  its fun to drive I guess.

These are apples from a Kilwins store in FL.  This store is just a really fancy Ben and Jerry’s, but hey, they do the fancy part well.  I have never been a big sweets person, I think i lost my sweet tooth somehwere freshman year of college.  Is that good or bad I’m not sure.

Here is the man I used to speak to quite often, again this is in FL, but i was pretty bored late one night and he was kind enough to show up on my screen.  In the lower left of the screen you can see me, but i dont really seem to be holding a cellphone, so I’m am alittle baffled as to why this picture even exists.

we went to this really nice italian restaurant and had probably some of the best food i have ever had.  delicious. thats all i have to say.

went to this bar called The Yardhouse with stacia one night, they had 150 different beers on tap, this was called a six pack.  you got a preselected kinda of hour devours of beer to taste.  Very delicious.

how beautiful.  im done writing just going to place my favorites here.

this is me, right now.^^^

Im going to get this guy as a next pet.  he is a bearded dragon, gets to be 2 feet long.

and this is where I work, seriously.

good morning all.

e

So I borrowed Jeff’s car, and drove it home.

For some reason, I backed into my drive way, instead of front faced first.  Strangely enough I also didnt turn the car off.  I walked across the street to my neighbors front yard and then i had the car coming at me prety fast.

luckily for me there was as tree in the way, so the car stopped short at the tree…but then something very strange happened.

the car got sucked down the area of the tree where the roots would typically grow.  infact, the entire tree was down in the mulch too.  so there was nothing there but a pile of mulch.

of course i immediately panicked, but more than that, i was astonished.  how could that happen?

i quickly got a shovel, from my neighbors house (those of which the personalities I do not know) that was completely silver and started digging.

Still. No. Car.

So i dug far enough to were I got to water.  Some kind of underground pool, clear in opacity and tiled out just like your friendly neighborhood suburban pool.  I quickly decided the best thing to do would be to scuba dive down into the pool, which was brilliantly lighted so no hardships could be found in the area of vision, but i had to run inside to get it from my house.

I explained what happened to probably all my neighbors, some actually believed me and investigated themnselves, but they let the problem solving to myself.

once I got my scuba gear, which i guess was convienent, i headed toward the “hole”.  The scuba mouthpiece was way too small for me, i couldnt fit it and when a breath was attempted it only resulted me me gasping for more air.  So i put it down and tried a snorkle instead.

I never found the car, but I woke up to a hairdryer.

damn that hairdryer. its not that i wanted to find that car as much as i wanted to know why the car got sucked down into a “tree hole”.

off to work,

e

So I started working at Reingold Inc, located in the Georgetown district of DC.  Its really a great place to work.  I just talk about tekky BS and code and design all day.  Some research is involved, but its nice that I am getting respected for knowing something others dont.  Anyways, sorry I havnt posted in a while, but I have just been so busy with work.

If you have a mac, I suggest you try to download picLens….its a firefox plugin and its awesome.

Thats all I really have to say for now, but I’ll update again over the weekend. chow.