Jacob’s Blog

I see blogging as the action of writing about and reviewing this thing called life. Sometimes that involves writing about what makes us happy, or what we are interested in. Sometimes it involves voicing an opinion. Other times, it may involve writing a negative review of some aspect of life.

Sometimes, others disagree with what is written.

So, here is my question to other bloggers out there: What sort of negative reactions have you see to your blog posts?

Have you been told to take an anger management class, to quit whining, or to get a life? Do you think these responses are justified?

In case you want to play any guessing games:

1. It has been 8 days since I’ve done this. Over the last month or two, I average doing this about once every seven days.
2. It has been 20 days since I’ve last eaten this.
3. It has been 48 days since I’ve published this. In those days, 889 people have benefited from this.
4. It has been 58 days since I’ve experienced this, although I’m not likely to announce the details of this publicly.

Please feel free to guess what this is by leaving a comment.

Tell me your stories about how you have been separated with a working cell phone. Have you dropped your phone in the toilet? Has it just stopped working over time. Did it get hit by a car, or stolen on the pickpocket bus in Romania? Even if your story is not extremely interesting, drop a note so we can get an idea of what goes wrong with cell phones.

A few months ago, I started aggregating posts from some of my other blogs. When I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, things stopped working for just a little while, but I think I have them working again. In addition, I’m now aggregating posts from my ScriptureCast.net blog.

I apologize if today’s work has created a sudden influx in blog posts for you to read. As always, there are two feeds for Jacob’s Blog: The Atom Feed contains all posts aggregated from all my blogs, and the RSS2 Feed contains only posts from this blog, without any aggregated posts.

1. Lord of the Rings trilogy
2. Spiderman
3. The Incredibles
4. Transformers
5. Eureka season 1
6. Oceans 11
7. Back to the Future trilogy
8. Pride and Prejudice
9. Finding Nemo
10. The Princess Bride
11. Life is Beautiful
12. Star Wars Episodes 2 & 3
13. Star Wars original trilogy (on VHS)
14. Monster’s Inc
15. Ghostbusters
16. Cars
17. Ratatouille
18. Shrek
19. Hook
20. Fantastic 4
21. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Christmas Update: I added some movies to the above list that I received for Christmas.

BYU will play UCLA in the 2007 Las Vegas Bowl. BYU comes into the bowl with a 10-2 record, finishing first in the Mountain West Conference after defeating every other team in the conference. UCLA comes to the bowl with a 6-6 record, finishing 5th in the Pac-10 conference.

Interestingly, this will the the second meeting of the two teams this year. One of BYU’s two losses on the season was at UCLA when the cougars lost 17 to 27. This means that BYU will have time to revenge the loss from earlier in the season.

BYU and UCLA will meet again in the 2008 football season.

My friend Bruce recently brought to my attention that this blog was mentioned on page 8 of the November 2007 edition (PDF) of Schooled Magazine. Here is what they said about me:

BYU student Jacob Peargrove writes a personal blog (jacob.peargrove.com/blog) that talks about everything from student-housing homelessness to compus-wide YouTube ban. “This is my persoanl blog,” he writes. “I put here anything I want to, even though some of it might be strange.”

My name is not Jacob Peargrove, as the article suggested. In fact, I know of no one with the last name of Peargrove. When I think Peargrove, I think of a grove of pear trees. In aspect of blogging, the term Peargrove is mostly meaningless.

I’m not really big on publishing my last name on this blog. For the longest time, I tried really hard to remain anonymous in writing this blog. However, since my identity here becomes increasingly less anonymous, I’m not so worried about it anymore, especially since my name appears on the bottom of every page in the copyright statement.

Please take a look at the about page if you would like more information about this blog. You are also free to read some of my comments about campus homelessness or BYU YouTube bans.

A couple of weeks ago, I began aggregating the posts from some of my other blogs into this blog. I’ve now updated some of my feeds to represent those changes. There are now two feeds associated with this blog, depending if you want the aggregated content or not.
Continue reading Two feeds for the hungry…

I was at the store the other night, and I saw root beer, orange cream and black cherry sodas, cranberry juice, and the list goes on. It made me think, what would be the finest single beverage you could just sit back, relax, and drink.

I think for me, I would like a nice bottle of fine, smooth, root beer, straight from the glass bottle.

What is your favorite beverage?

I’m selling my textbook for Ecen 313. The book is in good condition, with lots of handwriting and other notes. The bookstore sells this book for $104 new, and $78 used, although I only saw one used book when I was in the bookstore. You can buy my book for only $60. You can buy the book by clicking on this button, and then you can pick it up from my office on BYU campus. If you have never used Google Checkout before, you can sign up for it here, and Google will pay for $10 of the cost of the book.

I had a lot of time to think today driving from Oregon to Utah. I found that I have a lot of questions about myself, and about life in general. Here are a few of them: Continue reading Like swarming bees, questions of life…

Tonight I was putting just enough gas in my car to get through Christmas. As I was leaving the gas station, I noticed this cop parked in the shadows. Not a big deal because I wasn’t going to do anything wrong. But I was waiting for a few cars to pass by so I could safely get out in traffic. These cars were turning right at the red light. I notice that the last one raced around the corner without stopping, and I looked at the light, and it was still red. It was obvious enough for me to think, “He just technically ran the red light. I wonder if the cop is going to pull him over. Then I saw the cop pull out of the parking lot right behind me. I made sure to stay in the right lane so that the cop could pass me on the left. And then I just kind of followed slowly and watched the cop race after the car and then pull it over.

I’m not sure if there is any point to this story other than, please don’t be an idiot when driving.

Almost two months ago, James Chasse Jr. died during an arrest by Portland Police. The situation is somewhat controversial because some eye witnesses claim that the police officers used excessive force, however a grand jury ruling exonerated the officers of criminal wrongdoing. But the controversy isn’t the subject of this post.

Recently the police reports of the incident were released, and KOIN 6 News was reporting on what they said. The news station said that the police accounts of what happened were inconsistent with accounts of bystanders. The story ended with Jeff Gianola saying, “Another possibility is that police understated their reports.”

Wow. To me saying that “police understated their reports” is just one step away from calling them liars. A major news station making such accusations is inappropriate. They should present the news and the facts, but not the possibilities of what could have happened, especially when such possibilities come close to calling our public servants liars.

After the recent Superman Movie, one of my friends asked about that little curl in Superman’s hair.

I have done extensive research into Superman’s hair. We learn from the October 1959 Superman comic book that his hair is indestructible and can neither be cut nor can it grow in Earth’s atmosphere. Only Superman’s X-ray laser vision is powerful enough to cut his own hair. Although this fact is somewhat refuted in Superman IV in which Lex Luthor snips a strand of Superman’s hair on display at a museum in order to create a Super-clone.

There may be many reasons why Superman has the curl. One person suggested that the curl was representative of action–that Superman was always springing into action to protect the innocent. One website suggested that Superman purposely wore a curl because Lois liked it that way and Superman is just another man trying to please a girl. Some people don’t know of a reason other than it is just a trademark. However, I speculate that the curl was really just to show how all around super he really was–that he could fly at supersonic speeds and keep his hair in place. Hair that stays in place–that truly is super!

Although the spit curl, as it is called, is closely associated with Superman, only 7 out of 10 superman characters actually wore a curl.

Jacob has been a very popular name over the last couple of years. Of course, I was named Jacob before it was quite so popular. The meaning of the name Jacob is Held by the heel and has Hebrew origins.

I’m not really sure what that means, “held by the heel.” I mean, I can envision someone being held by their heel, but I’m not really sure what the significance of it is.

Jacob is a biblical name. It is used in the Old Testament, and also in certain translations of the New Testament. It is also used in the Book of Mormon.

Last month I announced that August 2006 was the biggest month ever for this website. August’s reign didn’t even last a month as September, with 4 days left in the month, just passed up August. Well over 1000 users came in so far this month through Google alone, which is a 30% increase over all of last month. The photos category was the most popular, while posts about search engines and Halloween dances were the most popular posts.

Thank you all very much for reading. I appreciate every visitor, including the rude ones, but not really the ones that spam.