Advanced Darkness

10. ASPARAGUS

9. Without any milk.

During the August of 2009 I came up with a list of my top ten favorite Spongebob episodes. I know this because I saved the list on my computer and dated it. This small fact entered the royal realm of relevance relatively recently because a friend of mine, as it turns out, did not grow up with Spongebob.

Naturally, I sought to rectify the situation by watching the ten greatest episodes with said woefully deprived friend (Eriche) and another friend who, like me, knows Spongebob far too well to be socially acceptable to most people (Chad). My first step, as you may well have gathered, was to consult my old list. Alas, I found some things on the list that I did not agree with. Incredible failures to appreciate which episodes deserve to be where, on the part of my former self. So I rewrote the list, expanding it in the process to include my top 25. I present you now with merely my top ten, all of which I have seen in full in the last few days. Envy me at will. And no, Cole, in case you ever read this, "The Algae's Always Greener" did not make the cut. But you knew that about me already. Your contempt is palpable, even from here.

8. It'll keep you from getting any uglier.

7. Dude, can I have some ketchup?

6. Because. It's an art collection!

I did other things too this week, would you believe it? I went to class. Yeah. That's exciting. I read Exodus, off of which one of the greatest episodes of "Courage the Cowardly Dog" is based ("Return the Slab!"), sorta like how Spongebob has an episode based closely on "The Tell-Tale Heart" (not ranked here) and another one based more loosely on Lord of the Flies (ranked number three here). I read some of Numbers too. And yes, I know Leviticus comes before Number, but that's the order Larry (the professor) had us read it in. Calm down.

5. You're welcome!

We're talking (and reading) about witch trials in my British History course. Bottom line is none of you will be able to hide the signs from me anymore; I'll be able to tell which of you ought to burn. Or drown. Or be hung. It's like when Snape taught a lesson on werewolves in the (ultimately successful) hope that one of Lupin's students would figure it out, right? Perhaps I'm taking it too far.

4. That guy had no front license plate! Let's get him.

In my world literature class we're reading Genesis this week, which isn't just your average everyday awesome, it's Advanced Awesome, because I read Genesis last week for my Biblical Literature class.

3. Make a wish, honey.

And then there's my physics class. We're starting the unit on relativity today, if the syllabus is to be believed. If I don't finish this blog post before I go to that class (more than likely), I'll let you know how that went. [Just got back from class. We talked about Newtonian physics summore. Boring.] Hopefully by the end of the semester I'll understand all those things that would be cool to understand.

2. I understand you have a dying animal on the premises.

 Before I forget, I want to make sure I admonish all of you for failing to come up with the answer to the question I posed at the end of my post last week. Miss T was the only one who even guessed, and I wouldn't expect her to know that the date on that image was that of the 935th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, and the ninth anniversary of the birth of Jason's roommate. Tsk, tsk.

1. Wouldn't that be the top?

Alright, now for the moment we've all been waiting for. Time for the recap on the Ducks' week! Hooray! Take five minutes to calm down, then read on. The Ducks have played thrice since we last convened over the fireside (by that I mean last week's post), and they lost the first game to Tampa Bay, then beat Carolina and Chicago. All in all, a decent week. They still need to play really well for the next month and a half to make the playoffs. To be specific, they need to win 16 of their remaining 20 games to have a realistic shot, likely even more. That ain't easy. Neither is designing a ski resort from scratch. Which brings me to my new-found hobby.

This requires some background that some of you may be familiar with and some of you likely aren't. I've been drawing trail maps for made-up ski resorts ever since I figured out how to draw at all. The eastern half of the house that my parents now occupy by themselves is home to over a hundred hand-drawn trail maps (not to mention over a hundred "real" ones), all of which were drawn by either myself or someone with an eerily similar genome. I could discuss this further, but I already have in my common app essay, so if you really want to know more about it you can ask to read that. The reason, then, that I bring up this eccentricity of mine is that it is very much related to the hobby that I stumbled upon last week.

As you can imagine, I spend a lot of time on Google Earth. I pour over the virtual world, learning as much as I can about it. (If any of you think that this is inconsistent with my belief that paper maps are superior tools of navigation, I encourage you to think about it for a few seconds, and if you still have a problem with it, I further encourage you to take it up with me.) Last week, it dawned on me that Google Earth has a function (probably not the right word) that allows you to pick multiple points on the globe and they will be connected by a line that follows the contours of the Earth. Now, put yourself in my mind. After you're done enjoying the fabulous view, you'll probably realize that two points connected by a contour-adhering line sounds an awful lot like a chairlift. So yep, I've spent double-digit hours (Not an exaggeration. I'm being dead serious.) creating ski resorts that, like the paper ones that I've spent so much of my life composing, aren't in operation, but unlike those paper ones are set on mountains that actually exist. Thus far I've created seven ski resorts from scratch, as well as added chairlifts to a number of real ski resorts, thereby helping to abate that feeling that I'm sure all of you are familiar with, you know, when you're skiing somewhere and you see a slope that's just outside the resort boundaries and you think to yourself, "Damn, they really ought to put a chair up to that peak." And making them isn't as easy as you think. You've got to keep in mind that your resort has to be accessible and it's got to have terrain for all types of skiers (Unless you're Aspen Mountain, which has zero beginner runs. Or anywhere back east, where there are no expert runs, despite the fact that many of them are designated double-black diamond.), but most of all, it has to have snow. And to have snow, you need to do two things: be at a high enough elevation, and face north. Seriously. Drive up to Big Bear and compare how much snow there is on the north-facing slopes compared with the south-facing ones. Or Mammoth. Or Park City. Or anywhere else. Just go on Google Earth, and try to find a resort in North America whose slopes face predominately south. Betcha can't.

Raise your hand if you think preserving this wilderness is more important than installing a chairlift in it. I don't see any hands.

My one complaint: Google Earth likes to use summertime images.

Well, I think that's about it for this week.