One sexy bitch if you ask me.

Sadly, the new year marked a new ignorance of this country to the worlds affairs. We cannot blame the ignorant for their ignorance, but we can blame those who cause this naivety to continue. What I am of course referring to is the potential war against Iraq. I suppose I normally wouldn't rant in a photo album, and those of you who could care less may skip this portion, but I invite you to contemplate a few things.

I recently read some statistics that 52% of americans believe that Iraq supports Al-Qaeda terrorist activity. This could not be further from the truth. In fact, the united states government recently released a video to the press showing Osama Bin Laden cursing america. However, they cut this video off halfway, before Bin Laden went on to curse other secular leaders, including fucking Saddam Hussein. There is NO FUCKING terrorist connection with Iraq and ANY group as far as we know. The US government is using terrorism as a scare tactic to entice public sentiment toward the war effort. This can be shown by our government's reaction to the news approximately 1 month ago that neither Germany, France or Russia would support us in the war effort. We quickly spread in the news that an Al-Quada operative was captured who claimed that an attack would occur in Miami, New York or Washington, and we raised our terror alert to Orange in an attempt to deter the public's eye from the failure in the UN. The Al-Qaeda operative did not fucking exist. They supposedly administered a lie detector test over a whole week after his capture and his 'failure' of this test was ample evidence against the supposed terrorist activity, yeah fucking right. Also, more recently, it was discovered that pentagon documents evidencing bartering between Iraqi officials and Nigerian Black Market Uranium dealers were complete forgeries. Did you hear about this? Probably not, the news media has regressed to an era similar to during the Vietnam war. Concerning the 'danger' of Saddam against americans, let's attack this from two standpoints. First, Iraq does NOT have ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) capabilities. They cannot hit a target outside of the middle east. Secondly, from a game theory perspective, what incentive does Saddam have of attacking an american target outside of his jurisdiction?? He will be immediately annihilated if he did! Jesus christ, we're about to kill him for NOT attacking anything, let alone if he actually did something. Now, let's attempt an explanation of the war from another standpoint, economics. I do not with to attribute the entire war for the desire of petroleum resources, god knows what the men in power in this country have brainwashed themselves to believe. However, consider that the price of petroleum has risen from $9/barrel to $31/barrel in the US from 1990 to 2000 and yet the price of gasoline has jumped only 46% nationally. The government has been dipping into US oil reserves for years to depress petroleum prices and prevent an economic recession due to fall in Aggregate Supply from rising petroleum prices. This just furthers the argument that we have been in an oil crisis for some time now, but its been hidden under the surface. In Britain, gas is already $4 per gallon or higher, and similar numbers are found throughout Europe and other continents as well. We need oil so that Bush and his cronies can feel guiltless driving their new H2's. However, even if we win the war, do not expect gas prices to decline drastically. This precedent of pre-emptive defence cannot be set. North Korea will have no trouble pre-emptive defencing our eventual pre-emptive defence of them. It becomes an infinite length subgame routine with the only nash equilibrium being immediate action for any two nations in conflict. Mexico currently has a rotating seat on the security council in the UN. Thus the united states needs them to favor war in order to get UN approval for military action. 90% of mexican's recently polled were against the war, and their President Vicente Fox knows this. However, the united states has been putting loads of pressure on the president and has threatened economic repurcussions if they do not comply with our desires. What the fuck right do we have? As a last note, I wish it to be known that for the past 11 years, the united states has enforced a trade embargo with Iraq. Not only this, but we have given zero humanitarian aid to Iraqi civilians. Worst of all we have repeatedly vetoed efforts by nearly every other UN Security Council nation to give humanitarian aid to Iraqi civilians. How is it that we can prevent other nations from saving innocent lives? (If anyone wants articles about this stuff, just IM me)

Jamie, Zach, John and I decided to show our sentiments in Washington in the largest march on the capital in many many years:

I never could get to a viewpoint adequate for gauging the size of the crowd, but it was estimated that well over 100,000 people were in this march. You can see the capital building in the background of this picture. The day in question was about 20 degrees and we were outside for nearly 5 hours, cold-tang. Alright, I think that's enough seriousness, time to express these sentiments in a more appropriate way. On the way home from some dude's place in DC, Zach and I saw a car with the bumber sticker with an american flag and the words, 'United We Stand'. We made our own variation:

For the low price of $50, we will make you a bumper sticker of the above. You can credit Zach with the George W. picture; dont ask where the blood in his mouth came from. Chances are, that picture is the crudest and most disturbing thing you've ever seen, so I'll let you catch your breath.

The first part of the semester was depressingly low key, thanks to the worst weather ever and a general lack of party action due to fraternity rushing events and whatever. We still managed to have a great time though. Spring break was fucking awesome, and I spent the last few days of it in DC with Gavin and Zach and their friends. We were confused why, regardless of the warm weather, there was still snow on the ground. A search of gavin's lawn produced the answer: UVA hat wearing snow daemons. Zach tempted it with a tasty snow treat while I prepared for an air to ground snowball assault.

 

Sadly, the attack did not work out as planned, the snowball simply increased the power of the snow daemon. We did not give up, however, and busted out the heavy artillery:

 

With the snow daemon vanquished, we quickly turned our youthful suburban aggression on one another. Zach at one point had me cornered behind a tree, but I applied my learnding and outsmarted him:

 

The battle continued for hours before I dealt Zach a heavy blow. He slumped against a tree, the entire world spinning:

 

After stomping on his face for a while, I got bored and we all decided to make up and throw a good ol' tribute to Ratt:

 

God bless america. After Spring break, it remained cold for some time; Zach and I decided that the trend was permanent and indoor sports would be the future of this country, and the source of our future income. We decided to be NBA stars. With the help of Leila Baghdadi, the basketball goddess, we were well on our way. Before long, we even developed awesome basketball poses:




Eventually we realized that Zach's awkwardness would prevent either of us from being drafted anytime soon. As a result, I turned to the General Clinical Research Center as a source of funds. Professional lab rats make surprising amounts of money, and get to have multiple objects shoved into their arteries at once! Here's a picture of the happiness and joy I experience at the GCRC:



Sadly, I failed to document much of the latter half of my spring semester. I rarely went out because I decided to start landscaping in Charlottesville, which required early mornings on all four of my weekend days. I also spent a lot of time at the hospital for my studies. In terms of the femmes, I really didn't make much progress, except for this possum that I met sometime in April.

For Spring break, I decided to go to Baltimore to visit my friend Nabil at John's Hopkins and my friend John Sireci at Goucher College. I took a train that Gavin coincidentally also was taking to get to Philadelphia. We brought water bottles full of vodka onto the train with us and chugged them until we were trashed. When I was let off in downtown Baltimore, it was about 11pm at night, and I had several miles to walk to get to the University. I still remember walking out of the train station. I thought that I had to go right, but, seeing a *Bridge Out* sign, I inferred that left was the way to go. So, I started walking. About an hour later, I recognized that the street numbers were going up, and not down, and this was the wrong way. It was snowing, and I was starting to get cold, but I had no choice but to turn around and keep going. I had two heavy bags with me, and the area was not quite the safest part of Baltimore, so I was just praying not to get mugged. It was about 1am when I reached the busted bridge again. The bridge was under construction such that it was only a criss-cross of small steel bars covered in snow. It took me about a 1/2 hour to cross it because every step had to be so carefully placed. Once I got to the other side, I walked another two hours before arriving at the University. As you can imagine, I had sobered up well before this time. I really enjoyed my time in Baltimore, but I didn't take too many pictures. Here's one of Nabil and his roommate Sameer:



Some of the best experiences of Spring Break were learning how to smoke cigarettes effectively and also going to a foam party at Goucher.

The end of my semester was much less eventful. Overall, my classes went well, with Numerical Analysis being the hardest but also the most fulfilling. Another reason I sucked all semester was that I decided to start programming Revenge of the Sharpie Daemons, which has most of its groundwork complete and basically only lacks the fringe elements, ie plot, dialogue, landscapes, etc. Just for the sake of having another picture, here's a sample of the code:



Its written using Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 with the basic WinAPI libraries, DirectDraw/Direct3D, and FMOD for audio. You should find a zipped almost updated copy of the game (the only zip file) on my root directory: www.people.virginia.edu/~cjp4f/ Here's a couple screenshots of the game as well:





That's if you care. The end of the semester was strikingly similar to the end of the previous semester. You know, the old touch a girl on the shoulder and get smacked with potential UJC sanctioning deal always comes back to haunt you. The real similarity came in my getting a second tattoo. This one's design originated on a website; I took the design and added my own effects then Tim Forbus at ACME tattoo did the rest. End result:



This picture also provides a fantastic view of my infamous tiny nipple action. Finals went pretty poorly as they were all scrunched together in like two days, making studying nearly impossible. Interestingly, my grades were negatively correlated with difficulty of the classes. I suppose that looks better on a transcript though. Anyway, Summer was delayed since I stayed an extra week to complete a study at the hospital, which was relaxing and exactly what I needed.

Forward to Summer 2003
Back to Index