Halloween

Tomorrow is Halloween, and in Toledo if you opt out of the cheesy haunted houses (there's even one at mall), and do not have kids to trick or treat with, this holiday doesn't offer many activities. That's not to say there are not costume parties, but we can't all be cool enough, or uninpregnated enough, to attend these.
On a fairly recent trip to the south I saw many brochures for haunted tours, or graveyard walks, and this was in the summer. So I though this would be a perfect Halloween activity, the problem, it doesn't exist in Toledo, or at least not that I could find.
The only cemetery in the area that offers tours is Historic Woodlawn, which would have been fine, but it was not offered often, actually only twice. Once in the first week of October, then again a week later at 11 am on a Tuesday, not very convenient.
So being the husband of a history chic I explored some of the graveyards in the area (other than Woodlawn) and found that there is another historic (and creepy) cemetery, very near to downtown, and therefore close to my home.
The real thing about this graveyard (Forest) is that it's owned by the city, and has some of the oldest graves in the city. Also it is in some disrepair, most likely being that it's in the neighborhood that it is. So as you can well imagine I came up with a novel idea, the city should do something in conjunction with the University of Toledo and do Halloween history tours of the cemetery's it owns. Then it could use the money from the tours to help with the upkeep of these historic sites. Then if it went well they could offer a year round tour, but hell, this is Toledo, and there I go offering solutions that make sense.

Driving to taco bell

Vodcast

This vodcasting stuff is much harder than podcasting. It took an hour to render a video, and than if was messed up I couldn't reedit the video I just made, I had to go back to the original and then render it again. So lots of time lost. Then Uploading was an all night process, and to top that off it didn't finnish until 12:05, so I might not even get a grade for this. So if you want to see the thing that might not get graded it's at http://www.soundsfromtheghetto.podcastpeople.com/ , or I and going to attempt to load it on www.youtube.com and post it in my blog.

Net Shy

I have never been a talkative person, I'm what most would call shy. I'm like little blue Paxil ball, bouncing along, watching the butterflies. However I refuse to medicate myself, or at least I refuse to medicate with the help of my doctor.
Self-medication is the way I made it through my early twenties. The term liquid courage was applied to me often. The point I'm getting at is that, like most those of the shy persuasion, I don't like to talk. The reason being that I feel like I have nothing to say, or more to the point nothing interesting to say. And so in I took the sage advice of Kane from "Kung Fu", "When what you have to say is no better than silence, it is best to remain silent."
Like most great television advice this quote is most certainly stolen, but from whom I don't have the time to look up, also it translates poorly to the real world, wherein if we were all so inclined little would be said.
More to the point, I am strange, and my particular brand of mental illness deals directly with conversations. So that I would rather be in uncomfortable silence than a conversation. Which leads me to the phone, a device, in my opinion, designed specifically for conversations, therefor it is my nemesis.
My wife knows all to well this quirk of mine, however few realize how deep this insanity goes. In the 90's when e-mail was new to the general public, I jumped on the bandwagon. Hoping e-mail in IMs would be my savior from shyness.
I, however, was mistaken, and could not conversate electronically any better than I could in the old fashion way. Which leads full round to the class I am now taking in Blogging and podcasting.
Both of these are fine, and I can do without any anxiety. However when it comes to the comments I lock up. So, to take this long diatribe down to a point, I am going to make an effort to comment on every post by every person in my class, in an effort to overcome this dilemma.
So if you see a bunch of comments from yours truly you now know why.

Taser Video

This video is not the best view of this incident, it's out of focus and jumpy in many of the scenes. If you want a more complete idea of what happened hit the menu button (you have to have started playing the video for anything to happen) and watch one of the other video's that come up, the one with the news cast has the best picture, and then there is even one that follows this student outside that shows what happens before the police take him away.

UF Student tasered at John Kerry Speech