Wednesday, April 13th 2005, 23:07
It's not so much what's happening around you, it's about how your expectations match your perception, where one can influence the other. You look at yourself, and think that you're neither the top nor the bottom of the heap, and... that's really it. My only concern is time, but then again, I've wasted way more hours before.
Monday, April 11th 2005, 11:58 (Playing: Min Erhabe - DAM)
Every time I read the Wall Street Journals, I see the words "Iraqi insurgents" and "terrorists" somewhere, usually in the front. I'm so tired of this bullshit.
Monday, April 3rd 2005, 00:17
For a moment, Champaign was dead.
However, it would take more than a complete idiot to think that the stillness will last through the night. "No way man, no way", I thought to myself, "something is going to happen, very soon". I looked around me, and all I saw were blank faces. They were aghast, shocked, utterly defeated.
They couldn't believe the Fighting Illini lost.
If anyone wants to know what college students are made of, then this is it. Within seconds, people started screaming, and shouting, crying curses of fire and thunder upon the UNC players (and their mothers), and filling the skies with blood and anger. Hordes of men and women, many thousands of them dressed in pure orange, congregated on the streets within minutes, with the speed and discipline that are the envy of many armed forces in the world. Then the fun began.
My part was simple: start walking from Pulido's place, go past the convenience store, then carefully cross Green Street, where all the bars were. Then, move quickly down forth street, past all the apartments and social fraternities, and reach the Armory. Finally, run across the Peabody party dorms and sneak my way back into my room. Bonus points for making sure that the laptop was still in usable condition upon arrival.
The first part was simple, just make sure you don't get hit by plastic cups and cooked burgers. With the high air resistance and weak trajectory, that wasn't difficult. Then things started to get tricky when I got to Green Street. As I said before, swarms of drunken students, at least ten-thousand of them, were already gathered in the middle of the roads. Seriously, that one police car in the middle of the swarm... that wasn't even funny. The problem wasn't so much trying to dodge flying objects. Rather, they were simply running along the streets in one big mass, and the whole thing was like trying to move across a moving horde of wildebeest. I was bumped into left and right, but thankfully not by one of those really large fat-asses that uses their mass to make up for the lack of velocity in E = 1/2mv^2.
The walk along Forth Street was even more interesting. People were moving along every direction to join the riot, and along the way, glass bottles were being thrown in random directions, some of them landing very close to me, and others seemed to be headed right towards car windows. I didn't even look back to see if it landed. But glass bottles had to run out sooner or later, so they started to use biological weapons - urine. With some good height from apartments balconies, that liquid could easily reach up to 10 ft, with a wide-angle impact that could easily ruin the day for small groups of pedestrians, friend or foe alike.
The fraternities were even deadlier; unsatisfied with the limited power of beer bottles, they began to send out groups of raiders for some close-range combat, pushing and shoving people that weren't dressed in orange. If I weren't a good short-distance runner myself, I would've got much more than the couple of pushes that I received. In addition to these frat boys, they would also provide cover fire for them in the form of fireworks, some of them landing 3 meters away from me. And whenever they caught the attention of the police, they would quickly retreat, hiding all their bottles and other forms of riot-equipment, even taking care to pick up all the bits of the paper wrappings of the fireworks that they released on their front yard. The police, hopelessly outnumbered in the first place, didn't even have a clue where it came from.
As I neared my own room, things were getting less dangerous, but still strange. Some students even brought their parents along, and of course, they were pissed. Their plans to get some alcohol after the games doesn't pain a very optimistic picture either. Right now, the closest staircase that leads to my room is closed off, because of "blood and glass" as the RD said. I could hear firefighters and police cars outside. My roommates were pissed as hell.
As for me... eh, I'm quite apathetic about all this really. Yeah, everyone wanted to see the shortest NCAA team this season win in a sport where height was everything, but still, life has to go on. Sure, all this rioting is an experience, but I have actually heard from my friends that our school is already one of the more "civil" ones. Man, I couldn't imagine that. Anyhow, I got class at 8:30am tomorrow, and more than half of my class are Chinese immigrants that doesn't even know what basketball is anyway. Class cancelled tomorrow? Not a chance.
Life goes on.
Sunday, April 2nd 2005, 13:46
Daylight savings everyone!
*****
I can't believe how crazy things were on Green Street when the University of Illinois basketball team got to the finals in the NCAA tournament. Police estimates 5000-10000 people, which is like 20-40% of the undergraduate population, are out the streets rioting. Seriously, what will happen should we beat North Carolina? I don't know - I sure hope they win too, because if they don't, then very likely there will be a crowd of angry drunks knocking on my door!
*****
"Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, the federal government has advised airplane pilots against flying near 100 nuclear power plants around the country or they will be forced down by fighter jets. But pilots say there's a hitch in the instructions: aviation security officials refuse to disclose the precise location of the plants because they consider that "SSI" - Sensitive Security Information.
"The message is; 'please don't fly there, but we can't tell you where there is,' " says Melissa Rudinger of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, a trade group representing 60% of American pilots.
Determined to find a way out of the Catch-22, the pilots' group sat down with a commercial mapping company, and in a matter of days plotted the exact geographical locations of the plants from data found on the Internet and in libraries. It made the information available to its 400,000 members on its Web site - until officials from the Transportation Security Administration asked them to take the information down."
- The Wall Street Journal, March 22nd 2005