The End

This blog has served its purpose, whatever that was. After taking into considerations the opinions of my siblings, who dislike me talking about them online, I have decided it is time to stop. I suppose what finally pushed me over the edge on this one was when we were talking about my blog two nights ago during evening family time. While talking about the different advantages between dating and courting (don't comment) Grandma asked me if I supported courting, how come I blogged. When I asked her what she meant, she said they didn't seem like they belong in the same culture. I sort of see her point: Blogging is quite undignified. The siblings treat my blog like some sort of gossip rag.

So I'm putting down my pen. This is the final post. Au Revoir. C'est la vie. Adios Amigos! And all that lovely french stuff.

Nothing New

La. Sorry about the lack of updates. There is really just nothing to say. I also forgot to make a new poll. I guess I just have no questions. (Looking at recent polls, it seemed like I didn't actually have anything to ask anyway.) The problem with summer is that there are no status updates! Nothing happens!

Here's a status update that pretty much sums everything up: I've won 229 out of 241 Freecell games!! Woo hoo! That's over 90%! Yay! I am so bored...

Poll Problems

Frankly, I doubt anyone really cares to read about what I think, especially when most of them know me and anytime there is something really exciting happens we are going to talk about when we next see each other. Therefore I have been scheming up ways to increase blog traffic like some sort of wannabe internet guru or something. I recently told myself that the best way to increase blog traffic was to make a poll at least once a week. However, I have been staring at the screen for five minutes and have still not thought up a decent poll to post on my blog. The thought of a personal poll has occurred to me, like "In all brute honesty, how would you describe me? Coolest Dude Ever, Future President, Mr. Universe, Super Genius" but I have heard that personal polls are unwise, especially when half of your voting population are your little brothers and their friends. Little boys have a tendency to vote with the negative answer, although with this poll I wonder how they would do that?

Bested

Well, this might come as a surprise to some of you, but my ranking system is better than Fiore Dei Liberi's. Ho ho! Well, I guess I've proved how completely awesome I am in a poll that was only taken by five people, one of whom was myself and the other four were friends of mine. It looks like I am totally terrific. I think I should think up more polls like this, just to boost the ole ego some. (Not that it really needs it, though.)

Top Topics

After much clicking and studying, I've found out my top five topics of blogging this year. The winner was Andrew with 28, which is unfortunate because I usually badmouth Andrew in posts about him. The next three topics all clocked in at 27: Alexie (posts where Alexie comes in and says something either snide or hilarious), Mom (posts where Mom comes in and either tell me something I don't want to hear or worries about me too much), and School (whining). The last one, Politics with 26 posts, was probably bolstered by my trip to North Carolina as 16 of my 26 posts on this topic were written there. I have 223 posts overall since I started on March 30th. This amounts to about 5.78 posts a week, or 0.83 posts a day. Although I would have been much happier to have a round 1.00 posts a day, I guess I'll just have to make do with my lack of insight. (or I could just publish 77 more posts, including this one.)

Portfolio Power!

Hoorah! The Portfolio for the English class has my stomach turning loops since you have to turn it in on Wednesday before 4:00 to him personally or you get a 0! It's like some sort of ninja trial: Find me before sunset and give me the sacred manilla envelope or you will not learn the secret art of English! Fortunately I have a hint: He will be in his office all day, though he may run out for a few minutes to get lunch.

I was writing the "cover letter" for the portfolio, which is pretty much two paragraphs about what you learned over the semester, and it felt like I was writing a blog post about English class. Although I used bigger words and fancier sentence structure and less "Hoorah!"s.

Master of Interrogation

Yesterday while I was preparing my college lunch and Andrew was cleaning breakfast a great ruckus suddenly broke out upstairs.

"Hooray! Luke has tied his first shoe!" Heather exclaimed. Then Mom got excited and made an even bigger deal out of it and the upstairs rooms became very calamitous.

"Mark my words," Andrew said to me, "Luke brought an already tied shoe upstairs and told Heather he had tied it." Ha ha. Good luck, I thought. Every time I have sufficient proof that one of my younger brothers is lying, he will deny it and Mom accepts his word for it. Anyways Luke meandered downstairs as happy as a clam. "Hey Luke," said Andrew, "Did you take an already-tied shoe upstairs and tell Heather you had tied it?"

"How did you guess!?" Luke squealed. Andrew shrugged. Luke walked away. The end.

Really, nothing ever came from this encounter but a blog post.

5:00 Blog Post

The trouble with having to wake up early to go help Angel Food is that you have to get up at 5:00. I was having a fairly pleasant dream when my alarm rang. I quickly sat up and hit the snooze button. At about 5:05 I realized that sitting there staring at the clock and wishing I could go back to sleep would not help me at all so I hopped up and came down. Then I realized there were 30 minutes until I actually had to leave and the parents were out of town. So, logical conclusion: Make a blog post. There's not much to blog about at the moment since my brain is still alternating between off and on, so I decided to blog about why I blogged. Pretty boring.

Wow, I'm tired

The reason I haven't blogged at all in nearly a week is that I've been attending Shakespeare camp this week. The first performance is tonight, woo hoo. Of course, I always stumble home and then collapse somewhere where I commence to pant heavily as if I had just won a marathon. Since the performance is tonight there is no practice in the morning, so I can blog.

P.S. It doesn't seem to strike anyone else that the Twelfth Night cast will still be practicing when Winter's Tale comes to do the make-up for their performance.

Good Morning America!

It's five o clock right here and we're packing up to get out the door. On thing that bothers me is that it is a five and a half our drive and our cabin won't be open until one... That puts us three hours in the hole. Hm. Anyways, scheduling blog posts sounded so manly that I had to try it at least once so there might be something coming your way eventually, but warning: It'll have nothing to do with whatever I'm doing at the present time.

Off to the Mountains

Tomorrow morning I'm gone. I'm all packed and ready to zoom off! So, this is to say that I might not be able to make any blog posts for the next couple of days. I know I have said this many times in the past, and I know so far all such dire predictions have come to naught, yet I feel I am obligated to warn you that it might happen anyway.

P.S. The world might end tomorrow. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Descriptive Statistics

Alright, I'm a work in progress, I'm going to get better. Anyways, I finally figured out how to put reactions on the bottom of my posts. Now you can check to tell me whether my post was overall negative or overall positive. I'll work on my social acceptibility skills until I have it all down pat. So if this post makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, check positive. If it hurts your feelings or makes you think "Oh what a tactless and cruel jerk this guy must be" check negative. Then, I can create datasheets, charts, blah blah blah mapping my progress/stagnation/decline into pure evil. So help me out! Get active! Sanctification and all that jazz!

M__________'s Rant

I have been told by my family that having last names online is an extremely dangerous thing. They're right, of course, which is why I have scanned my posts and changed every single last name to M_____ or K_____ or whatever. I have not checked comments so if anyone wants a comment containing their last name deleted, just leave a comment on this post telling me where to find it and I will delete it.

There was actually only one instance I could find of a last name being used so I removed that. Not only that but it was M______ so it doesn't matter that I encoded it because it is in enormous uncensored letters at the top of my blog.

My parents were not too worried about the name of the blog though and said I didn't have to change it, which is a relief because thinking of a good name for a blog is a pain. This leniency probably has to do with the fact that even if you knew my full name, finding me would be impossible because EVERY MCPHERSON ON THE PLANET is named "Duncan." And you probably thought my name was weird, didn't you? It's a blessing in disguise, it is.

My first blog is on blogging, how droll.

Hoorah. Since I don't have class until 3:00 I might as well write something. Since I have not left the computer since my last post, nothing interesting has happened which might cause me to pause and say to myself: "I ought to blog about this interesting occurrence." Instead I have been pressing buttons and saying "Oooooh. I could poll my non-existant readers with a click of this button!" and "Ooooooh. I could alert my readers that there is adult content on this blog!" There isn't, by the way. It would just be a joke. It wasn't a very funny idea though so I decided against it.

For a second, I considered putting those boxes that ask reactions underneath my blog posts but I decided against it for two reasons: 1) I couldn't figure out how. 2) It didn't look that great anyway. Hmph.
Anyways, when you put reactions under your posts you run the risk of having your readers re-read your blog post and realize that you didn't say anything that remotely fit the very vague generalization reactions you listed. They're really not that great because they are all so ambiguous.

I guess I only have one more note: After writing this post I noticed that I used the two totally distinct words 'Oooooh' and 'Ooooooh' in my first paragraph. For some reason the spellcheck put the first one in red underline but totally ignored the second one. On that note, I just said the words again and there was no underline on either. The world is full of mysteries.

Filling up long hours

In case you didn't notice when you clicked on the link to get here or whatever, I decided to start blogging.

If nothing else, this blog will serve to fill up the long hours I spend here at UTC doing absolutely nothing. Since I have multiple hours of this every weekday, I expect that I will be updating quite regularly.

That's all I wanted to say really. In fact, I didn't even want to waste time saying it but if I didn't my blog would be empty.