HAPPY HALLOWEEN, EVERYONE! Don’t know what I’ll be doing tonight (seeing as how I’m currently feeling sick, maybe I’ll just stay home and hand out the usual apples with razor blades in ‘em. Just kidding), but I do know what I’ll be having for a hardy meal before the day is over:

Pork chops with pumpkin pie as a dessert.



Just kidding again. Maybe.

UPDATE: I got this cool little image in an e-mail by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory yesterday. It shows, in case you couldn't figure it out yet, a black cat hitching a ride on the Cassini spacecraft, the planet Saturn (which Cassini is actually orbiting right now) as a ghost, and Saturn's moon Titan as a pumpkin. Nice.

PHOTOS OF THE DAY... Wow. I do remember gas prices being that low...

CLASS OF 1998 REUNION... Last night, I attended my 10-year high school reunion at a restaurant in Pasadena. Pretty much a lot of my former classmates who I talked to before yesterday were apprehensive about showing up at the event. Of course, if any of you have already attended your get-together, you would know why. What would you tell them if you still lived at home? What would you say if they asked you about your job, which wouldn’t exactly be the most exciting or prestigious occupation out there (one of my old classmates used the term: "Not being accomplished yet")? What if you run into people who you didn’t get along with in high school a decade ago? For the most part, there was no reason to worry about these issues. My reunion went off really well!



Even without boozing up to feel relaxed for the event, it was easy to approach almost everyone at the restaurant. Even if it was people who I didn’t talk to AT ALL back in my alma mater, they were very friendly when I walked up to them to start a conversation. Granted, the conversation was brief ("Hi. What’s your name again? I’m Richard. So what’ve you been up to? Just work? Me too. All right, talk to you later")...but the fact everyone bonded last night was what made the reunion an awesome experience. And do I even need to mention how this helped make it easier for me to walk up to hot girls who I didn’t talk to that much in high school and take photos with them? There was one girl who I couldn’t approach for a pic (since she was sitting next to her fiancé on a couch for much of the night), but that’s okay. I was able to take a pic with this other girl (let’s call her Mandy) who was a cheerleader back in high school, and helped organize the reunion. Thanks Mandy...you did a great job!



All-in-all, I am extremely glad I attended the reunion. And that was the sentiment shared by a lot of my old classmates who showed up as well. Some of the other dudes who were considered "jocks" back in high school were cool to talk to, and I got along with one of my, um, former friends who I stopped talking to back in 2004. He’s pretty successful right now... Owns a local motel (which he said he’s gonna tear down and turn into a suite) and several Subway restaurants. I’ll feel envious when he or his family starts buying In-N-Out or Yogurtland shops. Of course, I think a lot of other people would feel envious about that too, haha.



AN ADVICE FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE YOUR REUNIONS COMING UP:

GO TO THEM. The most common remark when you ask someone if they’re going to their get-together—especially in this Age of Facebook and MySpace—is "Why bother? All the people who I’d want to see, I still talk to." Trust me... When you show up to your reunion, that mentality will go away, and you’ll be walking around the room taking pictures and wanting to know what your fellow classmates have been up for the past decade. And you’ll realize that it’s such a great experience to reminisce about the good ol’ days...when all we had to worry about was who to ask to the Prom or when to start that book report...and not about buying a house and then facing foreclosure, or who to vote for who would be suitable to handle today’s crappy economic situation and the war on terror.

I’m looking forward to 2018...

ABOVE: The green line marks the path traveled by the New Horizons spacecraft as of
12:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time, on October 23, 2008. It is 1 billion miles from Earth.
Click here to view the official webpage showing where New Horizons is in space.
(AU stands for Astronomical Units, in case you're wondering.)

NEW HORIZONS Update... Alan Stern, the head scientist for NASA’s New Horizons mission, posted an article on the main website today talking about various mementos that were placed on the spacecraft prior to its launch in January of 2006. Stern revealed the inclusion of the nine items during a speech he gave in the Udvar-Hazy Center (where, off-topic, Tranformers: Revenge of the Fallen filmed four months ago) at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The speech was held during the induction ceremony for the full-size New Horizons model (below) that now hangs from the ceiling of the Udvar-Hazy Center.



Click on the link in the previous paragraph to see what the nine items are. Of those nine, there is one memento that sticks out for me: The compact disc bearing the names of 434,738 people who submitted their monikers through the Internet between February and September of 2006. Even though my name is now safely on Mars onboard the Phoenix lander, orbiting our Moon onboard Japan’s Kaguya lunar orbiter, and heading towards the Asteroid Belt on the Dawn spacecraft (and will hopefully soar into space onboard three more spacecraft that are scheduled to launch in 2009. I’ll mention them around the time they launch, haha), it’s New Horizons that I wish I had my name on. Not that I don’t care about having my name on the probes listed above... I’m really grateful that those space missions provided the opportunity to have the public make its mark on them.



If you go to this journal entry, you’ll see how shocked I was when I found out that I could’ve sent my name to Pluto, and beyond. There was one online article that mentioned how people who submitted their names for New Horizons were pretty much securing some kind of "eternal legacy" for themselves and people they knew whose names they also provided...since New Horizons will eventually leave our solar system—and like Voyagers’ 1 and 2—head for the stars.



Mr. Stern himself mentioned in the article linked in the first paragraph that New Horizons will "fly among the stars and literally outlive the Earth itself." ARG. There was suppose to be a twin mission for New Horizons, known as New Horizons 2 (hope you didn’t try to guess the name too hard), which would’ve did a flyby of Uranus before venturing out into deep space. Unfortunately, this flight never got past the planning stage due to various reasons (one is listed here). It’s gonna be a while till NASA does another outer planet mission where the spacecraft departs our solar system. And when NASA does, I’ll be sitting at my computer...waiting to type my name and submit it to be sent off into the cosmos.

That was corny, I know.

NEW HORIZONS Blog Entries Archive:

September 26, 2005
December 19, 2005
January 7, 2006
January 17, 2006
January 19, 2006
April 12, 2006
June 15, 2006
February 27, 2007
October 22, 2007
June 8, 2008
October 23, 2008

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

THE 2008 WORLD SERIES... I’m rooting for Tampa Bay to win it all in the next 2 weeks. Thank you Rays, for unintentionally avenging the Anaheim Angels (don’t say a word, Arte Moreno) last night. F**K THE RED SOX.


Doug Pensinger / Getty Images

W... I watched the film after work yesterday, and Josh Brolin did a nice job portraying the Dubya. The one thing I noticed that they left out of the movie was Saddam Hussein being captured from that Tikrit "spider hole" in December of 2003, but there’s only so much you can put in a 2-hour flick. But seeing as how a major plot point in W. was the Dubya trying to make up for what his "poppy" (or papi), George H. Dubya, failed to do in 1991 (going all the way to Baghdad and handling Hussein himself), the inclusion of Saddam’s capture would’ve made the film feel more complete. To me, at least. By the way, Laura Bush must feel really flattered right now for having a babe like Elizabeth Banks portray her in the movie. Though where’s Jenna Bush?? (The Hills Lauren Conrad could’ve played her, haha.)



One last thing... I’ll have to look online to see if Morocco REALLY did offer to send monkeys to Iraq in 2003 to locate and set off minefields. Those crazy North Africans.

EDIT: Yep. Morocco is said to have offered 2,000 primates to be sent to Iraq. Here's one article talking about it. Of course, this website doesn't look like it could be taken seriously. Just type "morocco monkeys iraq" on Google to find more info about this. Leave the poor monkeys alone! Haha.

WOMANIZER... Say what you will about Britney Spears after things went downhill for her following her break-up with Justin Timberlake, and those wacky years being married to and then giving up custody of her kids to K-Fed, her shaved head, plus her little sister Jamie Lynn getting knocked up (and supposedly being knocked up again), AND their mom revealing everything about both of them in a tell-all book called Through the Storm, but you gotta admit: Britney sure looks hot in that music video for her new song, Womanizer.

Click HERE for the video, plus some still shots of her lying on a black bench. What is she wearing while on that black bench, you ask? Go to that page and see for yourself.



By the way, I'm well aware of the irony of writing about a song called 'Womanizer' in a blog that implicates that I would fit the definition of that song's title, nicely. Oh well.

VIDEOS OF THE DAY... Remember that X-Men cartoon that was shown on FOX during the early 90's? It had one of THE coolest intros, ever.



DragonballZ also had a neat intro... Too bad that live-action Dragonball film that comes out next year will probably suck ass. Sorry Emmy Rossum... I still think you're hot.

Lucasfilm Animation

STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS... I never watched the feature film when it was released in theaters last August (and judging from the reviews it got: Thank God), but I saw two episodes of the new, computer-animated TV show on the Cartoon Network tonight. Not bad. Makes me wanna dust off my Playstation 2 and play the Star Wars: Starfighter or Jedi Starfighter video games on it. But first, I need to re-print the cheat codes so I can take out droid starfighters without the fear of getting shot down. Why would I actually want to be challenged while playing these games? Where’s the fun in that? Haha.

I’m thinking about getting The Force Unleashed for my PS2...but I have to complete Star Wars: Battlefront 2 first. I bought that game the same day I purchased Revenge of the Sith on DVD in 2005, and I stopped playing when I couldn’t pass that Kamino level (where you’re on that rain planet from Attack of the Clones and get to play Boba Fett—or is it Jango Fett? Whatever—as you take on the Droid Army). I don’t think I’ll ever get back to playing Battlefront 2, so I’m off to buy Unleashed!! Okay no I’m not.

IMAGE OF THE DAY... Unfortunately, this won't be in Transformers 2, but oh well. This cool concept art pays homage to Michael Bay's 1998 summer hit, Armageddon. That flick was entertaining, if you like what makes Bay's films worth watching and movie critics crying and cringing. You figure out what I'm talking about.


Courtesy of JesterPictures.com

50 YEARS AGO TODAY, America's space program officially began operations. Awesome.