Ready for the apocalypse?

What is the one food you must have in your food storage, that you can't live without?

Dried apricots. Armageddon can come as long as I got 'em. Oh yeah.

Skills

What is your best trait?

I like my zany sense of humor. but some people don't.

Frailty

What is your worst trait?

I think this says it all.

David: What do you think are your greatest strengths as a manager?
Michael: Why don't I tell you what my greatest weaknesses are? I work too hard. I care too much. And sometimes I can be too invested in my job.
David: Okay. And your strengths?
Michael: Well, my weaknesses are actually... strengths.
-the office.

Specimen.

What is your favorite specimen?


Myself, of course: the perfect specimen of masculinity.

Oh, in my rock collection...

Actually, I have a nice piece of schist that I got from the santequin creek wash. It is shiny and gold-colored. very pretty. It's fun to make schist jokes with geology-illiterate freinds.

Me: "Hey catch this! -- how does it feel to be touching a piece of schist?"
Freind: "No way man, is it really?"
Me: What?

I also have a couple chunks of malachite that is a pretty green color. And some obsidian that is pretty cool-looking. And I have a bunch of trilobites somewhere, packed among my stuff. All very cool.

A Sour Note

What musical instruments do you play, or if you don't play any, why don't you?


I am not musically talented. No one in my family is. Well, my dad played trombone in high school band, for whatever that is worth, and he was known to occasionally break out a recorder and play the melodies to hymns. But none of us sing well. Music Lessons were something that was not so much as considered in my childhood by anyone in the household. Most of my friends are musically talented, though. It seems like everyone I know except me can sing a part. I can only sing melody, and if the range is very big, I may have to change back and forth between a couple of keys (in mid song) to be able to sing it.

However, when i was about 15 I decided I wanted to learn to play the guitar for the same reason that every 15 year old boy wants to play the guitar: to impress girls. Of course, I didn't know then that girls are only impressed by guitar-playing guys if the guy is also A.) good-looking, and B.) a talented singer. I was neither of the two, so I quickly found out.

So, I took a couple years of guitar lessons and learned to read music. I really enjoyed making music, although as I previously made clear, I was not very talented. I also taught myself how to play the right-hand part of a piano, and to play the recorder (provided that it is a melody which can be played in the key of c or g and all notes are between middle c and a high e) . Last year, I had a roommate who taught me how to play a few chords on a ukulele and so I have a small repertoire of three and four chord pop songs that I can play on the ukulele as well as a somewhat larger repertoire for guitar. Since I am insecure about my voice, I don't try to be beautiful, I usually try to be funny, making up parody lyrics or occasionally leaping into falsetto. I have preformed at several "talent" shows and parties, and don't do too bad for a guy with no musical background.

Food for Thought.

What is your favorite restaurant?


The restaurant I eat at most often is the Fortune Chinese Buffet on University. But That's not my favorite. I just eat there because it's cheap and close to work. If I am planning a dinner date or something like that, it would probably be Village Inn or IHOP if it's late at night: In the unlikely even that i am done with school and work and ready to socialize before 9:00 PM, I'll go to Goodwood Barbecue Co. by University mall.

However, I've never eaten better restauraunt food in the U.S. than I had during my LDS Mission in Brazil (2002-2004). I ate at a lot of great places back then, ranging from currascarias with all you can eat fillet mignon and exotic meats like gamequails and javalina to roadside hot-dog stands that the municipal health department didn't even know about. But I think my favorite of all was a little hole-in-the-wall called "Panela de Ferro" (The Iron Skillet) in Anapolis, Goias, which had an all-you-can-eat buffet of homestyle brazilian cooking (no gourmet meats here) for about $2 brasilain, which is about 85 cents U.S. Their refried beans had little bits of deep-fried pork fat in them that melted in your mouth with a burst of flavor... I know that sounds gross, but don't knock it till you've tried it.

When I Grow Up, I Want To Be A...

How did you decide to become a geologist?


As a kid, I knew I wanted to be a scientist: at least part of the time i did, there were times when i wanted to be something else, of course. I think when i was 11 or 12 I wrote my own future obituary in which I was a Nobel-winning biochemist who discovered a cure for cancer (before retiring to become Cheif Justice of the Supreme Court.)

Over my High school years, I vascilated between different sciences. I am aware of phases where i wanted to be a zoologist and specialize in rainforest fauna, a molecular biologist who would create artificial life forms (which I had no intention of forming into an army and taking over the world so stop projecting your own creepy little domination fantasies onto me), and an oceanographer who would fearlessly explore the deep sea-depths. I also thought about anthropology and archaeology. I don't think I ever really thought about geology per se, since i did not know any geologists and had little exposure to it. (earth science was not required in high school so I didn't give it much thought.) I did however, think abou becoming a Vulcanologist: That looked pretty cool.
My devotion to hard science was not unwavering. I also thought about being a writer, a diplomat, or a CIA or FBI agent. Diplomacy has never been my strong suit so I don't know what I was thinking about that one. Traveling the world was always a big plus though.

When I was 17 or 18, I decided to put all life decisions on hold until after my mission. (Three years after said mission, most of those decisions are still on hold.) When the time came to make a decision, I breifly even considered turning to the dark side (i.e. buisiness or pre-law, strictly for the money.) I realized that that would never make me happy, so I thought about it for a while. My thought process was somethign like this:

There are way more people who want to become archaeologists and anthropologists than there are jobs for them.
Ditto for writers, only worse.
Physics: They seem to spend entirely too much time doing math that involves integrals and wierd greek letters that I don't even know what mean.
Chemistry: I don't want to wear a smock and make tiny measurements into test tubes.
Biology: as much as i want to engineer an artificial life form, I really don't care to much for cutting up dead things.
Hey, Volcanoes are still cool! come to think of it, so are the oceans. And i love travel and the outdoors. I'll see what earth science has to offer and if there are career opportunites in it...

So i took Dr. Morris' geology 101 class. And it rocked.

And the rest is history. Not exciting history: history that no one wants to read and I don't want to write about.

Bettsman Returns

More thoughts on what i would be like as a superhero. See previousl post.


I think my pickup line would be "Yes. I am the fastest-moving man in the world."

Power Trip

"If you could choose any superpower for yourself, what would it be and why?"


I would want the ability to slow down time relative to myself, or to move so quickly that it were as if other people's time stopped relative to me. It's all relative, of course.

This power would make it possible for me to travel almost instantaneously and eliminate time-wasting commutes, increasing my productivity. It would also make it easy to win fights with bad guys since they wouldn't be able to see me or lay a finger on me and i could dodge all their bullets or other projectiles easily.

I think I would carry a backpack with ridiculous little princess and ballerina costumes and then, when I arrived on the scene of the crime, I would disarm and rough up the bad guys a little and then dress them in princess and ballerina costumes before I tied them up and left them for the police. Maybe I would carry a marker to draw fake glasses and mustaches on them too.

All this would be done at a leisurely pace for me, but it would happen almost instantaneously so witnesses would just see the malefactors doing their evil deeds one second, and then helplessly and ridiculously arrayed in pink the next.

I would move so fast as to be invisible to the naked eye, but I would still have to have a stylish costume so that I would look good if a high-speed video camera happened to catch me. I think I would wear black pants and a black leather jacket with a white t-shirt underneath and sunglasses if it were daytime. Maybe I would stand still long enough to pose heroically for (cute) witnesses, or go back into normal time for a second to mock the now-helpless villains before speeding off.

What Color Am I?

"Which Crayola crayon color best describes you and why?"


Right now, I think I am Denim - relaxed and casual blue, it reflects my attitude pretty well most of the time. Sometimes, depending on my mood, I might have to change colors though.

To see samples of all the Crayola colors, including denim, click here:
http://www.crayola.com/colorcensus/history/current_120_colors.cfm

The Worst.

"What, in your opinion, is the worst movie ever?"


I don't know what the worst movie ever is, but the worst movie i have seen in the past couple years is probably Dark Water. Basically, it's the exact same plot as "the ring" and made by the same guys.
It has three or four fake endings where the scene fades out and you think its over but then - oh no! on comes another scene where they try to scare you again. by the second one, the entire theater was groaning... and this was on opening weekend. People actually booed the movie once the credits came on.

Possibly the worst 8 bucks I have ever spent outside of the BYU Bookstore.

Another contender is Drowning Mona, which i saw with some friends as a teenager. It tried to be a both a murder mystery and a comedy, and was both the worst mystery and worst comedy Ihave ever seen, and every single character was so repulsive I just wished they would all die.

Not to be negative or anything.

Hola

This blog is like a tiny prokaryote that will evolve to become a complex life form. It may not be much now, but in a billion years or so you might begin to see signs of intelligence.