New Podcast!

Finally! Sorry for such the long wait.

 

School’s Out!

Finally! It took so long. But today was officially the last day. That means that summer is here! I have a somewhat busy summer planned, between taking an online course so I can take French next year, to going to Alabama to visit relatives. But, it should be fun!

I’m also planning on entering a local kids/teens film festival, and I’ve already started brainstorming for it. I’m hoping I can get a friend of mine to let me use their video camera, because the digital camera I use for book reports is okay for school things, but not bigger things. I have two ideas as of yet, one drama/sci-fi idea and one (quazi-) romantic-comedy. I have a couple of friends who I’d like to have read some lines and then cast them in. I’m very excited about it! It’ll be a great summer project.

I’m going to try and get back to posting AT LEAST once a week, hopefully more.

Well, that’s about it!

God bless,

~Agent M

Sorry Guys!

Yeah, I had to cancel the podcast for last week. Sorry! I was watching a documentary movie with my mom Friday night, went to a parade and then church on Saturday, and I couldn’t get on the computer most of Sunday morning.

 

I’ll try to make one this week, but if I do, it’ll be out around Saturday or Sunday. As I’ve previously said, I’ll be super-duper busy this entire week because of my school’s talent show, so my schedule’s pretty jammed from school stuff alone, not to mention extra-curricular (Ie: Blogging) activities.

 

Well…I really don’t have much else to say! I promise to try and do another post soon. 😉

 

~Agent M

Been Busy Again

Yes, it seems that in school, when it rains it pours. I’m using an analogy here (of which my English teacher would probably be proud) because it seems that projects never come one at a time…But rather, which a bunch all at once.

 

We have to write a persuasive speech for English. I actually enjoy public speaking, (Why else would I do a podcast?) but I don’t really like talking in front of my classmates. Because I know that a lot of them will disagree with me and a lot of people don’t particularly LOVE me, and I’m very nervous because 5% of our grade is based on if over 75% of the class (25 kids out of a class of 33) think you had a good speech. Gulp!

 

Now, normally, I’d be cool with that. We have a few weeks to do it, and it’d be fine to do some research and then write the actual speech.

 

But…

 

I signed up to write a speech for extra credit. They have this big thing at the end of the year with parents and kids and stuff and you can write a speech for it. I love writing, and speeches are fun, so OF COURSE I signed up! It’s due the 23rd, and it’s the 6th now, though, so I have a good bit of time. It only has to be about a page long. Buuut, my persuasive speech is due around the same time! Eeep! That and although writing a persuasive speech has its difficulties, but I want to write a funny speech. And that’s its own problems.

 

And I’m not done yet! But I’m actually pretty excited for this:

 

We have a book report coming up! 😀 I LOVE book reports actually. I’m a freak. It actually hasn’t even been assigned yet, but it will be next Monday. I’m going to do the Sherlock Holmes book, “The Valley of Fear”. It sounds interesting, from the synopsis I read on Barnes and Noble.com, but a bit graphic. But I always do love a good Holmes book. 😉

One of the projects we can do is make a movie for it, and I think I’ll be doing that. My birthday is coming up pretty soon, and I really want this Animation program called Anime Studio, so if I do get that and I get good at it, I’d really like to do an animated movie thing of it.

 

Speaking of which, this program (Anime Studio) looks SUPER cool! You can draw and animate things really easy from what I’ve seen and read, so I really, REALLY want it. I think I might try and do a podcast or something with it. I’d also been thinking about trying to animate a short or something based on one of my (many) story ideas.

 

Anywho, I have a bit of an interesting story to share:

 

So, in the auditorium at our school, there’s this tiny little closet with all the the sound stuff, a ladder that goes up into various rooms in the roof, (It’s super creepy from what I’ve seen. I haven’t ever climbed up it, but I’ve looked up there…scary) and some of the lights are up there and there’s even a time-capsule from 1984 in there! The closet, though, has a TON of random stuff in there. Like lizards. And beetles. And a football. And “Man o’ War Marine Varnish.” And old makeup remover. And a buttload of old paint.

 

So, the choir teacher wanted us to clean out the room a few days ago. So, one of the girls on tech crew went in there, with me shining a flashlight for the majority of the time, and she pulled out things of paint to the other three outside the door. So, I asked the teacher what to do with all this paint, and she says to open them all up, see if they’re still good or not, and then ask the secretary what to do with all of the paint. So after the paint is gone through (With a small mishap or two), I go up to the office and the secretary says to go and put them into this little storage room behind the Drafting/Art/Woodshop classrooms. They were putting all the toxic stuff there, and it was going to be picked up later. I went down there with everybody yesterday towards the end of the school day and the woodshop/drafting teacher (Who is SUPER cool, by the way) let us in. We had to make two trips, but we ran out of time.

So the next day (today), the choir teacher tells me to go down to one of the science teacher’s rooms and get a cart for the paint. I go down there (followed by the posse), and into the scary little storage room with the carts. She says there’s a bunch of jars and stuff on the cart and to put that on the bottom shelf, put the paint on top, and put all of it into the toxic-waste holding room. I go in there with one of the boys on tech crew, and it’s all dead stuff in jars. OH MY GOSH, I could NOT pick that stuff up. It was SO gnarly!! There were dead fish and a snake and little sharks and a frog and pig fetuses and this octopus that almost made me gag. The teacher said they were in this preservative called formaldehyde, and they stopped using it because it’s carcinogenic, which means it causes cancer! So, it was pretty spooky moving all of those creepy dead things with the dangerous preservative AND all of the ancient paint and varnish and whatnot.

 

Before I go, I’d like to tell you that next week I probably won’t be able to post too much. 😦 My school’s talent show is next Friday, and they have a ton of rehearsals for it that week, and because I’m on tech crew for choir and I’m basically the only person who can do lights, (Well, everyone else on crew can do the lights, but they wouldn’t know how to do as much in-depth stuff as me) I was sort of made to volunteer for it. Which means that 3/5 days I’ll be after-school rehearsing light cues, and on Friday, I have to be at school from 5:00-9:30 for the show. On my birthday.

 

Well, off to go try and write some stuff for one of my speeches and hopefully the podcast! 😀

 

God bless,

 

~Agent M

ESP Episode Three!

Check it ouuttt! It’s a day delayed because this one is super-extra-special. 😉

 

School’s In

Anybody who can tell me who sang that song gets an internet cookie.

 

Anywho, school started back today! I, like most of the other children, was rather sleepy and a bit giggle-y. Today was pretty nutty, seeing as it was rainy and we were all still used to being on vacation.

 

Now, I don’t want to complain…too much…but I was rather bitter at the amount of homework. We had 19 problems in math, and when each one takes five minutes to figure out, even 19 is horrible. I ended up skipping a bunch because I just could NOT figure them out. Ugh! Geometry is tough.

 

Otherwise, I had a pretty good day. Gave a few drawing-presents to friends, and had a good day overall. 🙂

Government Wants to Manipulate Children

I was going about my business and checking up on all my little silly internet things, when I saw on the Breaking News segment on the Toolbar we have “School cafeterias try psychology in lunch line”. I clicked on it to see what it was about.

 

Hide the chocolate milk behind the plain milk. Get those apples and oranges out of stainless steel bins and into pretty baskets. Cash only for desserts.

These subtle moves can entice kids to make healthier choices in school lunch lines, studies show. Food and restaurant marketers have long used similar tricks. Now the government wants in on the act.

My jaw dropped.

First things first: Restaurants do not do that. Have these people been into a McDonald’s in the last, I don’t know, twenty years? Sure, they have them up on the menu, and sure, maybe they’re in the commercials. But when you get a Happy Meal or whatever, what do they ask. “Fries?”

And why do they ask fries? Because everyone hates fries and nobody ever eats them? No. Because the majority of kids (Trust me on this one; I am not some idiot scientist with a creepy agenda, I am a kid) go to McDonald’s and get a burger or chicken nuggets or whatever and get fries with it. Why? Because most kids don’t have fries readily avaliable at home, so wee, let’s go to McyD’s and get fries.

And don’t even get into that McDonald’s crap. I never saw Supersize Me. That man was an idiot. Yeah, you know what, you’ll die if you eat too much salt. Or water. Or watermelons. Or every other substance known to man. It’s called doing it in moderation.

But back to the story.

So, now, the government is getting into it? Really? Because everything the Government touches just sprouts wings and becomes perfect little beings of magical happiness. Just ask FedEx (No funding), or GM (In the hole), or anything else that they government has gotten it’s sweaty little paws on. It doesn’t work!

Now, I remember the good old days in Elementary, when every so often I would go into the crowded little smelly section of the hall at lunch and get some Chicken Nuggets or get Domino’s on pizza day.

They had a big line of food and apples and oranges and chocolate and normal milk. Boom. For the most part, I don’t ever remember getting hollered at or “nudged” in a way where I was force fed by the nutrition Nazi to eat my orange or be shoved into some creepy little hole to be re-educated on food.

Man am I glad I don’t eat cafeteria food anymore.

I know that they have the Healthy Snacks machine at school, and it’s about $2.50 for a pack of twenty peanuts. When you could go over and get five bags of Doritos for that.

Otherwise, I know nothing about the lunch line.

This segment of the article was particularly creepy:

…Cafeteria workers also got more involved, asking, “Would you rather have green beans or carrots today?” instead of waiting for a kid to request them.

And just asking, “Do you want a salad with that?” on pizza day at one high school raised salad consumption 30 percent, Wansink said.

I would be a bit freaked out if I had people nudging me in a very subliminal way to eat carrots. I like carrots. But do I want a bunch of creepy Nuti-Nazis asking me in a very influential way if I wanted carrots? NO.

They said earlier in the article that schools that forced kids to put fruit on their plates found that most of the fruit ended up in the trash. I remember stuff like that from Elementary school, actually. I did it. I through away the nasty Red Delicious apples that tasted like mushy applesauce inside a waxy paper sack. They were gross and I hate Red Delicious apples. Ew.

But, am I obese? No.I’m not the picture of health, but that’s because I’m weak and am not athletically inclined. Sorry Mr. Food Nazi, if I hadn’t thrown away my apples in third grade, I’d probably still be a little over 5’4″ and still growing and not very athletic. Whoop.

And you know what? You’ll have little kids saying, “Okay, I’ll take a salad.” Then they take a bite and it tastes like cement and they will through it out.

And, these kids that are obese and weigh over 100 pounds in kindergarten, are they going to care that the chocolate milk is four inches farther than the regular? No. Will they care about all those salads? No. Will they still grab seven slices of pizza? You bet.

So, they’re trying to make more Healthy Choices available to us. But, haven’t they become more like Healthy Enforcements than Healthy Choices? How long until we have the Healthy Eating Laws? Or will we seriously have to add on that we have a right to religion, assembly, petition, press, and whatever food we want?

Related Articles

• School Cafeterias Add Psychology to the Lunch Line (aolhealth.com)
• School cafeterias to try psychology in lunch line (salon.com)
• You Can Lead Kids to Healthy Food, But Can Psychology Make Them Eat? (usatoday.com)

BABOOM TSSSSHHHHH

It’s raining. It’s pouring. My doggie is snoring. She got up, then went to bed again, and probably won’t wake up for a while.

It never rains in California, apparently, is a big fat lie.like, seriously. BIG FAT LIE. RAINING. SERIOUSLY. Gurgle gurgle gurgle.

It’s not lightning/thundering though. So that’s a relief.

I take that back. It will be thundering soon, according to The Weather Man. TRUST THE WEATHER MEN!!!! Hmm…that’d be a good name for a band. Randomness.

In other news: Last night I helped out at a church thing for little kids and painted faces/hands/arms. There were three little boys who I gave sleeves to. (If you don’t know what sleeves are, it’s when you see people with their entire arms covered in tattoos.) I drew a lot of masks on people’s faces, a hand full of butterflies and hearts, too. This is all I drew on these three little boy’s arms:

• Sharks
• Jellyfish
• An octopus
• A lion
• A tiger
• (Not a bear!!) A cheetah
• A semi
• A racecar
• An airplane
• Dragons
• Water dragon

And, I gave a little boy a curly mustache and sideburns. xD He looked awesome. I even got to paint my parent’s faces! My dad got a Mark-Twain beard and a curly mustache, and I drew whiskers and a little cat nose on my mom. I was also declared the best artist ever (FINALLY! Just kidding) by the little boys with the ‘tattoos’ on their arms. And listen to this.

Boy: “Why are you wearing a purple watch?”

Me: “Because I like to tell time.”

Boy: “So you’re a girl then…?”

Me: *Laugh* “Yeah; thanks for noticing.”

apparently girls like to tell time. Who’da thunk?

Hmm…

It’s SMLAARRRGGING, it’s SMLAARRRGGGING, Agent M here is BLOGGING…

–Agent M