world series -- here we come

okay, so we didn't win yesterday, but we still managed a wild card position. thank you los angeles. you were our angels! i think i see another world series in the future for the red sox.

i got away from school too late last night to get to burpee's, so i have to wait until tonight to get my copy of carrie. major bummer.

anyone here speak a second language? i know some of you must, since you come from different countries. must be weird, having english as a second language. i'm taking french, which only makes sense since we're so close to the canadian border. i was hoping my teacher would give us some good curse words to yell at those blue jays, but he's a little uptight about stuff like that. i know a couple, but they don't make much sense to me. they sound real good when you say them loud enough, though.

people are asking me what i'm going to do for the christmas talent competition this year. already. i'm, like, doods, it's not even halloween yet. i won second place last year, so i've gotta bring my a game next time.

keepin' on keepin' on

so i'm trying to get together with that mentor guy who's supposed to help me out with the web site, but he's one seriously busy dood, i guess.

great news -- my dad decided to advance my allowance, so now i can go back to burpee's after school and pick up carrie. i did mention that i picked that as the next book to read, right? i know i said that somewhere. too lazy to check back over my old posts -- lol! maybe i can get a discount. the guy that runs the place has a sign that says "every day is sale day at burpee's."

gotta get to my next class -- geometry. i love it. some of my homies are complaining about how hard it is, but i could do geometry all day long.

bzzzzzzzzz

hey, doods. how's it hangin? (that's a sk8tr term, by the way, so get your mind out of the gutter.)

i finished lord of the flies this weekend. sick book. when that navy dood showed up at the end, man, what a trip. would kids really act like that, you think? hard to believe, but maybe it's true. i mean, if people didn't believe it could happen, it wouldn't be a book they give us to read in school, after all.

my homie bennie came over on saturday and helped me with the yard work so we could hang out for the rest of the day. i owe him, big time. we shot some hoops, did some sweet tricks. survived the day without a scratch. i think bennie was disappointed. he'd like to get stitches some day to prove he's a ripper with steeze and not a sketchy poser.

found a copy of carrie over at burpee's department store on saturday. now all i have to do is save up some cash to buy it. i could check it out from the library, but the old lady who runs the checkout desk might not let me have it. i read the first coupla pages and there are naked girls in it. awesome!

tgif doods!

hey, everyone, it's fuh-fuh-friday at last! whatcha got goin' on for the weekend? i think my mom has a bunch of stuff for us to do around the yard. raking--why bother? there'll just be more leaves tomorrow? maybe i can invent something for my next science fair project that takes care of leaves when they fall. turns them into mulch on contact with the ground. that would be toxic.

i'm getting some help with the middle school web site. turns out someone heard all my barking and moaning. there's this dood steven raconteur who's gonna be my mentor. he knows a lot about web sites, but he's also good at getting people to deliver content. i mean, who listens to a kid? but an adult commands respect. it's not fair, but that's the way things are. sometimes you can "subvert the dominant paradigm" (i have a bumper sticker that says that. i love it because most people don't know what it means!!) and sometimes the dominant paradigm subverts you. the trick is to know the difference, right?

picking a stephen king book to read when i get finished with lord of the flies is hard. everyone's got a different suggestion. dood writes so many books! seriously. maybe i should start with his first one. it's about a teenager. a girl, but that's okay. some girls are chill. just don't ask me to name any names.

frost on the pumpkins

that's something my grandpa used to say when it got cold--there's gonna be frost on the pumpkins tonight.

cold weather helps the leaves turn color, they say (i'll have to look that up. maybe it's just an urban legend), and people around here love the fall leaves. that's what brings tourists, and tourists bring money and they leave some of it behind. (get it? "leave" it behind? hahaha)

i'm still thinking about what stephen king book to read for school. someone suggested the talisman, and it sounds really cool. a guy about my age goes on a quest across the country, like frodo. anyone else read that one? i'm working on lord of the flies for school right now. it's toxic.

one of the really neat things about the internet--you hear from people all over. i had a comment today from a guy in berlin, germany. that's awesome. he said something strange about my social studies teacher that i couldn't quite figure out though. maybe it got lost in the translation. the teacher is back today, by the way. wasn't swine flu. false alarm. someone got married, that's all.

some of you are doing a great job figuring out my little puzzle. i'm trying to drop a few clues to lend you a hand without giving too much away. here's my big clue for today--you have to look in places you don't normally look, and maybe click on things in your web browser that you don't usually click on. wysiwyg is cool, but it's not the rule, if you dig my meaning. by the way, what browser does everyone use? i have safari on my powerbook pro.

for those of you who solved the puzzle--remember how you did it. there's something you might need again later. that's all i'm sayin. you can shove needles under my fingernails and i'll never talk. (i'll scream and yell, but i won't talk!!!)

you're not trying very hard!

social studies teacher must have the swine flu. two days in a row she's been out sick. the sub is making us read a chapter out of the textbook about reconstruction. not like we couldn't read that at home. oh, well. gives me some spare time to surf the net. i'll bet my friend bennie is doing the same thing, even without a sub, checking out that page he's always going on and on about. ben-a-rino, the old hound dog.

so, anyone figure out the secret on the chester's mill middle school page yet? c'mon, gang, it's not rocket science! okay, so you have to do something you wouldn't normally do to a web page. pretend it's a car and look under the hood. check the oil. get your hands dirty, if you dig what i'm saying.

watcha watching on teevee this fall? i get to watch one show each night, so i have to choose carefully. i'd love to watch castle because nathan fillion rocks. firefly, anyone? it's on too late, though. maybe i can find it online somewhere.

webslave is more like it

i am so late today. i got tangled up with this webmaster job at school. the history teacher was sick and we had a sub so i got out of class to go work on the school's web page. well, try to work, that is. i officially hate being a webmaster. i mean, i got all these great ideas, but no one wants to give me any content, so all i did during my free period was run from one end of the school to the other and back again, looking for this dood and that dood.

long story short. i got one page done. big whoop.

anyhow, here it is: chester's mill middle school. impressive, no? none of the links work yet. maybe someday. like 2020 or 2030, which is when i figure those guys will get their frickin' act together. how hard can it be? really?

do i sound a little peeved? well, maybe i am. i did have a little bit of fun while i was at it, though. that's what happens if you give me free time and a computer! run your eyeballs over my old posts to find clues to the secret. couldn't make it too easy, though, so i switched things up a bit. take your best shot, doods!

petition

we, the undersigned, hereby petition the Chester's Mill selectmen, or congress or whoever is in charge of such things, to outlaw mondays. amen and hallelujah.

had a great weekend. played some ball, banged the board around the half-pipe, went to oxford speedway with my dad for the flea market. he let me pick out a new (used) bookcase for my room. he's going to refinish it, which is kinda like his hobby. keeps him out of trouble, my mom says. i thought i was gonna skate on the household chores, but mom came down on me like a hammer yesterday. when she stops calling me joey (no, you can't call me that--only she does) i know she's for real serious.

i've been hanging out over at stephen king's message board lately. today's his birthday, they say. i gotta read up some more about that dood. i mean, i like his books, but i know nothing about him at all, except he's from maine. who would guess that some big rich famous dood would live around here? i even read that someone wanted to make a movie out of one of his books here, bag of bones, but the state didn't cough up enough money so they're going somewhere else. major, major bummer. i coulda been an extra or something. my big chance, gone. anyhow, wikipedia, here i come.

i'm up, world. look out!

i'm not a morning person. not on weekends, for sure. my dad got me up at 11. i was having this dream, too. bummer. i can't write about it here, because it's kinda embarrassing, but it was toxic.

i'm trying to decide what to do for halloween this year. it's a big deal around here. there's always a parade and festival. we get a lot of people from away who come to town because of the fall leaves. folks are pretty cool about treats, too. my friend norrie doesn't even have to dress up. she could just go as her goth self. she took a faceload of stitches when she ledged out in oxford last year and it looked awesome. maybe i could just draw some stitches on my face and go as a board banger, but that would be sorta lame, doncha think?

i'm all set to play some bball with my homies, but my mom wants me to pick up my room, which is like the lamest job ever. i try to tell her i know where everything is, but she doesn't listen. bummer. catchya later, doods. and dood-ettes.

bball

i was varsity basketball last year, so i guess i had to go out again this year. i'm 6 foot 2 so i'm gonna be the center no matter what. just cuz i'm tall doesn't mean coach isn't going to bust my, um, basketballs, so i gotta work at it. i have this problem, tho. once i get good at something, i loose interest. i could beat my dad at chess by the time i was six. my mom took a couple of years longer. i need someone to challenge me. any takers?

i have to laugh at the tinfoil hat folks on fringe, but when you get right down to it, if you see a lot of horsesh-t then there's probably a pony somewhere in the neighborhood! i think it's a drag what happened to charlie, cuz you know he ain't ever gonna be right again. peter is cool--they throw all this weird-ass stuff at him and he just shrugs it off. i'm not sure what i'd do if something seriously weird like that ever happened to me. probably freak.

did you get the secret word spelled out in last night's episode?

secret messages

any of you guys watch fringe? i don't really dig all that secret government conspiracy sh-t, but i like this show. i surfed up some pretty cool info about it that i didn't know before. those funny fruits and veggies and flowers they show before commercials are really a secret code! i'm not goofin' witcha. each one stands for a different letter and if you put all the letters together each week, you get a word. one week, the code word was "codes." how awesome is that? you have to pay close attention, because there are dots and things that change which letter it means, but once you know the lookup table, it's easy as doing an ollie.

the old guy, walter, is pretty rad. he comes up with the trippiest things to say. and olivia, well, we all know what web site we'd like to see her on, right ben-arino?

small towns

i don't really like country music much, but people around here sure do. that and religious stuff, since we've got this monster radio transmitter out on a road whose name i'm not supposed to say cuz it has the word b*tch in it. that's pretty hilarious, don't you think? a church on a road with that address. it must drive the preacher bonkers to have to say it to people.

everyone's always talking about this song by this old dood james mcmurtry. i guess his dad's famous or something. anyhow, his song is supposed to describe what it's like to live in a place like this. i never lived anywhere else, so it's hard to say. it is small. we used to have a movie theater, but it closed. we don't have any golden arches or other places like that, but we do have sweetbriar rose on main street. lewiston isn't that far away if we need stuff or someone has to have one of those tight coffees everyone's always going on about. we even have a dirty book store. right, benny? right?

Chester's Mill seems huge to me. it takes forever to get from our place out to food city on the other side of town, mostly because i like going off into the woods instead of taking the roads. the woods, man, i could just go on and  on forever out there. it's like being on another planet.

i know everybody in town, too, and i do mean everybody, which can be a bad thing, cuz they all know me, too, and if i get into trouble, well...

speaking of trouble, i better get off this computer or the teacher's going to skin me alive. sometimes the POWERS THAT BE must be obeyed.

bummer! nobody gets eaten

on my way to school this morning i stopped at the town common to check out the new story king is giving away at his website. i have to tell you, man, this free wifi is the real deal. it's blazing fast. much faster than the rinky dink dsl we had at home before WiMAX.

the cannibals is pretty cool, except i was disappointed nobody got eaten. i guess that comes later in the book, the part we're not allowed to see. a bunch of people get trapped in an apartment building. the doors won't open. that's not so bad at first, i guess, though folx are getting pretty antsy to leave for work. but imagine what it would be like if they were stuck in there for, like, days or even weeks?

one part i didn't understand -- they had to go upstairs to the super's office to make a call. in real life, everyone would just whip out their cell phones and blackberries and iphones, maybe even boot up their computers.

the babe at the end sounds pretty hot, but i'm guessin' that she's a prude or something on account of how she's always praying.

friendly people

so i signed up on stephen king's message board. i asked for suggestions about what i should read next of his so i can write about it for school and i got a bunch of answers already. guess his fans are friendly and not weird like my mom thinks they all are. i even got an e-mail from him -- well, not from him exactly, just a newsletter -- talking about part of an old novel that he's just giving away starting tomorrow. it sounds radical: the cannibals. how awesome is that? people chomping on each other. ya gotta love it.

speakin' of my mom (i was -- look it up), she's making some of her tight chop suey for supper tonight. favorite. meal. evah!

wklv lv d vhfuhw phvvdjh

anyone into codes? the title above is in caesar cipher, which is pretty easy to crack, i guess. i love books and movies that are about solving puzzles. things like national treasure. even the da vinci code, though people like to b*tch about what a terrible book it is. i would kill to have a cryptex like they had in the movie. you need a code word to open it, and if you get it wrong, zap, the secret message inside is dissolved in vinegar. i bet i could figure out how to do something like that on a web page, too. if you guess wrong, it tracks your ip address and you don't get to try any more. you could go to a different computer, i suppose, but it would be hard. i could even have it delete the code if someone guesses wrong, but there are nitboys out there who would probably mess with it just to spoil it for everyone else. scratch that plan.

ok, enough about that. here's the puzzle for the day -- and you don't get to answer, bennie. what do you call wonder woman? is she a superhero, or a superher-ette or what?

and here's some cool trivia my dad told me. did you know that octopuses eat off their own tentacles when their environment gets stressed? i can't imagine anything being bad enough to want to munch on my fingers, but i guess you never know, do you?

wolverine: logan

have you checked out wolverine: logan yet? i know it's like so last year, but i talked my dad into buying me a copy when we were passing through portland on the way to bar harbor last weekend. brian k. vaughan is like god to me. his take on young logan is pretty rad, imho and it's cool that it's set in japan, which is a place i gotta visit some day. and the burning shadow monster that comes out of the ground? awe-some.

bkv also used to write for lost, which is like the most excellent tv show ever. they're killing us making us wait until next year for new episodes. major bummer. if you are in agreement, slap me five.

programming

so i got the gig working on the school web site. i showed the guy in charge what i knew about html and php and javascript and flash and he seemed pretty impressed. it's easy money, and maybe i can do something, you know, subversive by hiding secret messages in the text. it'd be pretty cool if you read the first letter of each word in a sentence and it spelled out FIGHT THE POWERS THAT BE or something like that. i have that on a sticker on my backpack. other kids seem to like it. or if you dragged the cursor over what looked like white space and there was a hidden message there.

i told the guy we should code in some sort of game to make the site more interesting, but he didn't seem cool with that idea. i was thinking of some sort of alternate reality game like i love bees, the one they did for halo 2. man, i wish i coulda gotten into that one when it was running but i was only like eight years old back then.

i wonder how hard it would be to set one of those things up. i'll bet bennie and i could do something that would be pretty cool. get norrie into it, too, if i can peel her off the skateboard. i'd need to come up with some really cool idea to get it started. maybe i'll even send some prizes to whoever finishes first ;)

back to school...again

had a great extra long weekend with my folks down in bar harbor. the weather wasn't bad, and we didn't have to do boring stuff all that much. the park had a pretty good skateboard area, so i worked on my cement shooting. it would have been cool if bennie could have come, too, but his folks had other plans, i guess. i did a full pipe and a half pipe without getting any road rash at all. it was toxic.

i got to miss a day of school because we didn't get home until yesterday. not a biggie. my teachers wanted to push me ahead a grade last year and i could have handled it but my folks didn't want me getting ahead of my "peers," which is a fancy word for my homies, I guess. i'm almost caught up already.

i read cell by stephen king cover to cover on the trip. not sure that i'll use that one for school, though, cuz it's about zombies and i'm not sure the teacher'd be cool with that. still, it's about cell phones, so maybe i could put a spin on it like how people who drive and talk on the phone turn into zombies. you dig what i'm saying?

school stuff

so, they send us back to school and then turn around and give us a long weekend, like right away. whose bright idea was that? way to stick with the program. i think my parents want to go camping, maybe down to bar harbor. i know my dad just wants to check out a different bunch of flea markets. he's always looking for furniture to refurbish. if you don't hear from me for a few days (yeah, i'm looking at you bennie, and you too norrie) utter a prayer to the deity of your choice that the mosquitoes don't get me.

classes are pretty cool so far. i got into this debate with my english teacher about our reading list. i told her we should be reading stephen king. i read three of his books this summer (the shining, the dead zone and bag of bones) and i gotta read more. this dude is seriously creepy, but in a good way. she told me i could get special credit if i wrote a paper about one of his books. at least she didn't shut me down. what's really neat is that he's from maine.

computer class is the best, even though they never really teach you all the coolest stuff. the super secret sh-- you have to learn on your own. after he caught me disabling the parental controls on my computer, the teacher said i should probably volunteer to work on the school web site. seriously. volunteer? people get paid to do that. if i play my cards right, maybe they'll fork over enough so i can get my iphone that way. worth a try, right?

right!

wired!!

found out something awesome today. the entire town of chester's mill is now wired for free wifi access. that means i can go online anywhere -- at school, in the park, down by the river, in the backyard, anywhere. isn't that amazing? they're using this new technology called WiMAX so they didn't even need to run wires in town. never heard of it before, but my good buddy wiki has an article about it. how did people get along before wiki? must have been like the dark ages.

wish i could get an iphone, but my parents say they're too expensive. maybe i'll get a job delivering the newspaper to raise money. the lady who runs the democrat seems cool. i wouldn't mind getting up early, either.

back to school

summer's over? already? man, what happened? when i'm PRESIDENT, i'm gonna make summers longer. he can do that, can't he?

what sucks is the blog i started last year is gone. into the bit bucket. it was on the school server and they wiped it all out over the summer. no backup, either. so, this is me, starting from scratch. drag.

big question: do i play basketball this year? everyone expects me to, because i'm tall and all, but i dunno if i want to. so, tell me what you think, peeps. not you, bennie. i already know what you think. mostly about visiting biwp dot com, you dog.

hey, break's over, so i gotta zoom. english class. wonder what cool sh-- we'll be reading this year.

Later, doods.