Snow(boarding, ball-fight) and How to Distinguish the Crazies

Hello Readers,

'Tis a fine day in Hachinohe. The weather is hovering around -4ish (Celsius, so maybe mid to high 20's Fahrenheit) and there is a small layer of snow coating the ground. And I'll be heading to Okunakayama tonight for some snowboarding. Yes, life couldn't be better. I also had a fulfilling weekend last weekend. I finally snowboarded on the infamous Mount Hakkoda! The snow there was perfect. It was so powdery that, when I fell, it felt like I was being cushioned by a big marshmallow pillow. And you what what it means when you're not afraid of falling, right? You aren't afraid of learning! Yeah, going off jumps, no problem, carving down a slope, no problem.

Perhaps the best part of Hakkoda is that it's back-country. This means that the 2 courses (the rest are back-country, and you go down at your own peril) have trees, interesting, windy courses, and are so much more fun. It's so much better than a regular downhill course. Going through the trees and along small paths is wicked intense!

On Sunday was the Shichinohe White Battle. Here's the gist of it: 3 minutes to pummel your 7 opponents from your stockpile of 90 snowballs, or capture their flag. Oh yeah, this is a serious thing, there are even umpires surrounding the fields. It was more fun than it sounds. We annihilated the first team. We only lost one of ours compared to all 7 of them; even successfully defending against a rush to our flag at the end. The second game...not so good. Half of our team was out within 30 seconds. Yours truly was gone before he could even get behind the first barrier! It's really too bad it ended so quickly, it was wicked fun.

So, that was a good way to spend a weekend- it was super satisfying.

You wanna know what else is satisfying? This here Q&A session. I'm not sure why the Republicans agreed to such a thing, and why they bowed under pressure to air the entire Q&A when they were originally going to air only Obama's opening speech (though, depending on the spin of the site you go to, some will say they bowed under White House pressure to air it, others will say that it was a GOP idea to air it). Why am I confused why they would air such a thing? Because it gives a direct outlet for the President to refute all of their spin in front of the American people. When you can have nigh-unlimited control of the message you are sending the people, why would you ever let an intelligent leader come and prove the core of your messages wrong? Obviously, I loved it, especially when the President deftly refutes Congressman Pence's loaded question on the economy. If you would like to see exactly what he was refuting, so you can get a clear, unbiased look at the GOP's viewpoints, please, look at their 30 page (well, around that much, I guess Cover Pages and Table of Contents shouldn't really be included...) "solution" on their website http://www.gop.gov/solutions . Maybe you should read that first and then watch the video, so you can get a look at where the logic is faulty. (And yes, the solution to all of the problems we currently have in the USA need only 30 pages to fix!).

Ok, done with politics for now.

As a frequent reader of news on the interwebs, I run across many people with opinions who've commented on articles by equally opinionated (yet payed) people. Some of them sound ok, until their logic begins to devolve into a meaningless mash of falsities lying somewhere between Barney the Magic Dinosaur and your 10 year old cousin's book of funnies. I present to you part of my short guide to vocabulary for the crazies are on the internet:

Noplanhagen, Plight House, other random mix-mash of famous events/locations that belie conspiracy- These people are the conspiracy theorists. They are the ones who think that the moon is sending gamma waves to affect the brains of politicians around the world in order to get them to trash the earth and force a move to the moon, because it's so lonely (to those learning English and are reading my blog, that sentence is probably gonna be a toughie). Usually their posts start off ok. Many times it's with an easily proven fact, such as "Most humans have 10 fingers." From there, it is a downhill conspiracy theory spiral: "But after the 'climate short-change' meetings at Noplanhagen (for those not in the know, there was a big climate-change meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark recently), soon we're all going to have 13 fingers and 14 toes due to the increased emission of nuclear power plants." Once you hit one of those signals, just stop reading, it's just better for your health that way.

Bass-ackwards- Oh how clever and witty you are, with your swapping of the first letter on bass-ackwards! These people are also part of the crazies. They're usually the ones who write something like "it's people with degrees who got us into this problem, so why don't you try letting the people WITHOUT degrees try solving it." There is something charming about the logic. These people, like conspiracy theorists, can be found all over the internet. Again, once you hit this keyword, just ignore the rest of the comment.

That ends the very short guide to the crazies on the internet. Keep on the lookout though, you might just be reading a crazies' blog! Japan? More like Joe'sPan, ohh!