David's Tangled Thoughts

I hope that everyone who celebrated had a great Thanksgiving Day. Tomorrow is the last day of my four day weekend and it sure feels like this weekend has actually been shorter than normal. Crazy. Having dinner with my family went well for the most part. The food was great. The turkey was fantastic—as my mom and sister would attest to (heh heh). Mom made lumpia and I had to fight the dog for the last pieces. The dog won. Photo albums were brought out and there was some fun with those. I am beginning to hate one part of these family get togethers and that’s when someone tries to guilt me into going to church. I don’t go to church because my dad says that I’m an embarrassment to him because I don’t take communion. I don’t take communion because I am prohibited if I do not believe in the teachings of the synod. My grandma has already told me I’m going to hell. I wouldn’t put it past her and my aunt to suddenly show up at my door with the pastor in hand to try and save my soul. B

Anybody remember this? Just try and get that out of heads again! h/t to mchelbert for the vid upload.

I've read 15 of the books listed below in their entirety. I don't really believe that the BBC really provided this list but anyways... Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Tag other book nerds. If nothing else, it's a good way to pick some summer reading material! 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 16

I'm an 80's child and I like my 80's stuff. One of my shirts has a big G.I. Joe logo on it and I wear it to work sometimes. I get thumbs up by my fellow coworkers who grew up watching the show but there is this one guy--Tyler... well let's just say that we sit on opposite ends of almost everything. "Oh look. G.I. Joe. Nothing like a jingoistic TV--" "--Shut up, you snake loving commie." It's a good thing that the people who overhear that and worse, know that we really don't hate each other.

On my 1999 trip to the Philippines, I had to go through a pretty invasive pat down as I went down the causeway to the boarding area for my flight back home. The guy who performed the procedure didn’t touch my groin but he covered everything else. I’ll tell you it steamed me up, and not in a good way. Well get prepared for the TSA here in America to give you a “thorough” check which includes touching your “junk.” At least if you don’t want to be seen naked. On one side you’ve got people yelling that it’s an invasion of privacy and an illegal strip search because they don’t have probably cause. On the other, you’ve got people defending the policy saying that it is all for our safety and that those that don’t like it…well, they don’t have to fly. I’d say I lean more to the protesters on this issue than the defenders. While I recognize the need for safety, I believe that the TSA is going too far. The need for every person to decide whether they want to be seen naked or felt up aren’t accep

Last night I had a blast playing a trivia tournament. I was originally invited to join a team with Ed and Amanda but they suddenly had to change plans and go out of town. I got a call from her sister asking me if I was still interested. There was a ten dollar entry fee and I had to bring a dish to pass. We started pretty well with 2nd place but then we slipped to the middle of the pack, and then to second place, and then to dead last. We kept on saying that we were going to make a comeback. Some of the questions were insanely hard yet were low-value questions. For example, can you name the last President that became a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? Yeah, didn’t think so. It was Taft by the way. It was actually a question about Notre Dame and the University of Michigan that got us back in the game. And wow, did I feel dirty about it, especially the UofM question. The question was what was Michigan’s first state university and where was it founded. I believe everyone was

I am a Filipino American. I am a German American. Someone I know from the internet as a visible tattoo of the German flag and he gets comments from people written in German. They assume that because he has this tattoo he is German so they assume he can speak the language. He can’t. Elsewhere on the internet, in a comments section of a news article, there was a little flame war which ended with one of the guys saying that he was a Scottish/Irish American. The guy that he was trading with was from the UK and said that he was an American period and that he can’t be all three. In the US, it is common for someone to say that they are this kind of American or that kind of American and it must be perplexing to Europeans as to why we go around saying this. How can a person be a German American and not speak German? How can a person be a Filipino American and not know how to eat fried chicken with a spoon? I sometimes think on how I can make any claims on my Filipino, German, English, Spa

I needed to get rid of some carrots and a head of cabbage so I thought I would make some lumpia. (Recipe here .) I headed to the Sari-Sari store in Mishawaka only to find the building gone, taken over by an expanded intersection. This was depressing news as I didn’t know of any place that sold the Simex brand of wrappers which I am fond of. I tried the Korean store that I knew of but as I suspected they didn’t have it. Let me give you an example of why I love my smart phone. As I sat outside the Korean store, I googled up oriental stores in Mishawaka and South Bend. I found one promising result that was just outside the Notre Dame campus. Then I pressed a button to get turn-by-turn directions to the place. Oh what wonderful technology we have available now. If only the coupon app that I had anything useful. The Oriental Store (yes that’s its real name) did have what I was looking for, thankfully. It has now become my new go-to Asian store. While I was ringing out, the very

I love it when I check the Canadian news and the biggest thing they've got going is a controversy over potash. Oh to have those kinds of problems!

You know those personal/professional exercises that are supposed to get you to open up to your peers? Like fostering trust by having a person fall backwards into the arms of some other people? Well I had to go through that today but it was one of those, “so tell us a little about yourself” deals. Now there’s a lot I’m willing to talk about if someone asks, but there are things that I probably would never admit. One of them is if I had 31 brothers and sisters. Yes, someone shared that and my jaw, like everyone else’s, hit the floor. The lady said that her father did not discriminate when it came to women. No doubt there. Forget that Arkansas family, I would have probably watched a couple of episodes of this jagoff trying to provide for his kids. –‘Cause you know he can’t! Seriously, there are people in this world that really make me wonder why we can’t sterilize people first and then reverse the procedure when they pass some kind of test showing that they are capable of parentin

I’ve just finished up the movie Hamlet. It’s the fourth time I’ve seen it and what I like about it is that every time I do, I gain some new insight. I catch an inflection or a phrase that has a deeper meaning. I can make a connection from one scene to another. It’s great… except that I hate Shakespeare. Reading Shakespeare and even watching it live or on screen is torture! If I was watching it done in Spanish, I’d probably enjoy it more. I think the reason why I hate it is because I can understand half of it and other half leaves me all confused. It’s the most frustrating foreign language (it might as well be classed as that) I can try to work through. It’s still awesome, though, when you make those mini-revelations.

From the way it looks, the Republicans, as expected will take the House but will fall short of the Senate. This actually might be a blessing in disguise for them. If they were to have taken both chambers, they still wouldn't have been able to accomplish much as President Obama still holds a veto pen. Going into 2012, the Democrats would be able to say that the Republicans had control of Congress but couldn't accomplish much. Since the lower house is in the hands of one party and the upper in the hands of another, the Republicans can say that they still can't do much since the Senate and the President are still stumbling blocks and can appeal to the public to remove them. Still the Republicans have quite a rope to walk as they have to appear to their Tea Party backers that they are standing up to the President Obama and the rest of the Democrats. Yet they still can't go too hard against the other party as that can backfire on them if they can't move any meaningf

Thanks to the good folks at Publius , I was able to get a copy of my ballot so I could do some research before heading to my polling location tomorrow and casting my vote. It may surprise you to know that if it had not been for the research, I would have known next to nothing about most of the candidates on the ballot. As for the candidates for Indiana offices, that’s a whole different story. I’m Walorskied out because the media hub for this region is South Bend, Indiana . I don’t get much media from Michigan sources. So taking a look at what I had and eliminating all third party candidates, it looks like I will be voting almost straight party. There are three Democratic candidates that I plan on voting for, though. There are a few sections that I will defer on making a decision though such as the fire protection and road repair which are asking to raise taxes on property owners. Since I don’t own any property… well… Proposal 1 is interesting. Under Article XII of the state con