The Creatures' Gentle Glowing Never Lasts

Those are lyrics to a song by Laurena Segura, a Canadian girl that makes music on YouTube. This song in particular is called "Fireflies of Montreal" and is written more mellow than her song "Permafrost". I recommend checking her out, because her music has an acoustic folksy flair to it. 

There are so many things I could write about this week, be it a rant on having mid terms or RICK SEBAK VISITING MY BLOG, or seeing The Chief at the O'Reilly yesterday in Pittsburgh. But what I think is going to happen is that I'm just going to start somewhere and go from there.

I guess I should explain why I mentioned Rick Sebak. For those of you from Pittsburgh, you should know Rick Sebak's trademark scrapbook documentary style, and even those of you who watch public television (if you don't know what that is, you should probably leave the site. I'm all about public radio, television, and internets) could be familiar with his Breakfast and other assorted specials.

Anyway, in a crazy Sunday haze, I decided to send a link to some of the people I follow on twitter to this website. This included Jim Lokay, John Green, and Rick Sebak. I said something along the lines of "if anyone actually reads this, I will freak out". Mr. Sebak actually did that, and responded by telling me he also saw BBC 2 1/2 (REALLY old and abandoned project, circa late 2010). 

I think that it's amazing that someone actually reads this, and I want to thank Mr. Sebak for reading this, even if it is the blog of some crazy sophomore from the South Hills.

This week has been interesting in other respects, namely revisiting the cultural district to see The Chief. It's a pretty well written and EXTREMELY well acted one-man-play about Art Rooney Sr, founder of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

I think I appreciate theater for a number of reasons, but part of it is that I've been in basically every element of it, except in a directing or writing capacity (and I don't EVER plan on going into that... seems too stressful). It's a magical place where for a little while you can escape the mountains of American Cultures homework, the headaches of the real world, and genuinely get lost in something.

Theater reminds me of music, something that people who are passionate about work really hard on and get lost in. It really says something when you see that someone throws himself into his or her work, and it loses the idea of being 'work'.

I'm off to WYEP again tomorrow (for the first time since the HOOTENANNY which you can listen to here: http://www.wyep.org/audio/wyeps-holiday-hootenanny-broadcast-2012) and no doubt will have some magic story to tell about down there. I guess radio and Re(imagine) work is what I get lost in. Only time will tell though. 

On a complete aside, I realized that I've been working on my troop site since January 10, 2009... meaning this is FOUR YEARS of doing this web designy thing... which is insane. Okay, back to reality.

It Seems Everything Has Been Found

What I want to talk about is a combination of two things: Education and the Espy Post.

I grew up in a world where it seems pretty much everything has already been invented, and the only frontier is cyberspace, which is a virtual and endless space. Essentially meaning do whatever, all is already done. I say "seems" because this is a LIE.

Gavel Block Thingy in the Post

Same applies to the GAR Post ("Civil War Room" to most locals) in the Andrew Carnegie Free Library. Back two years ago, I signed up to become the youngest docent for the Espy Post. There are a lot of things in this post, and it's a lot to give a tour on, but it seemed everything was known. Boy, was I wrong.

So I've added another project to my list of projects to do, this time something commemorating the 125th anniversary of the Post's memorial out in Chartiers Cemetery off of Noblestown Road in East Carnegie. Ideally, we're going to do something on Memorial Day weekend.

I've decided to do some research into the original dedication day, and I didn't have to look too far to find some interesting things. There is a little explanation of it in the 1911 catalogue:

... The monument was dedicated July 21, 1888, at three o’clock P.M. The following program was carried out at the services: Prayer by Rev. Wm. Lynch; music, “Mustered Out,” Allegheny Quartette Club; original poem, Miss Josie S. Sholes; unveiling of monument; music, “Unreturning Braves,” Allegheny Quartette Club; dirge, St. Luke’s Brass Band; oration, Col. John A. Danks; music, “America,” Allegheny Quartette Club; doxology; benediction, Rev. Beasom. The day was fine, over three thousand persons were present in the cemetery. ...

as well as it running two weeks straight in the local paper. I'm trying to imagine how three thousand people fit into the cemetery, and what it was like on that 'fine' July day in 1888.

It's called 're'search for a reason: things aren't lost, they just aren't together. It's the job of the person looking through those things to mesh them together into some semblance of sense. Being that person who tries to mesh it together is an interesting yet nerve-wracking feeling. Considering that every single person that contributed the $1500 to build the monument have passed and many are buried in the GAR plot surrounding this monument.


They present education to us as a definitive thing. "This is all the math you will need" "Read the classics" and those sort of things define a "curriculum." The senior project in the Carlynton school district is basically a presentation answering the question "what do you wanna be when you grow up?". It's very much a system based on filling in the box and moving on.

Inside of the Espy Post

But I think a true education is much more than that. It's looking at microfilm of newspapers from 1888 to try and understand why something in existence now matters. To be totally honest, before I had started becoming a docent, I had no clue what the Grand Army of the Republic was, that there even was a veterans organization after the Civil War.

I'm very much opposed to this notion that High School teaches you everything you need to know. Yes, it may fill your 'need's in some respect, but I feel it's a bare minimum, and if you want a full education, you need to look for that full education. This doesn't happen in a classroom but rather in a library or in a radio station on the South Side of Pittsburgh, or even at a monument in a cemetery.

I say think because I'm not sure if I'm right. Some people are able to just accept things, but I know I can't. I think that if you want to understand something, you have to try it or at least delve further than face value. You don't need to invent the wheel, but you can. All this going deeper with meanings and yet I still am bad at interpreting poetry.

The Devil In The White City: An Overview and Blog

Okay, so I just finished the final book (of 3... hear this one, Education Dept? Nope? Okay...) assigned to me for this summer. Granted, I have 4 days to spare. I consider myself somewhat of a procrastinator... which is a bad trait.

Nevertheless, one of the things I had to do for the one was keep a journal. Which I did on a parallel site, but due to issues I am not publishing the whole thing. I am going to just post the overview on my main site, next Friday. So, technically the following is the second written, first in a series of book reviews I want to do on this site. It's one of the new format ideas I have, and I'm going to see how this works. Here goes nothing.

The Devil In The White City: An Overview

So I recently finished the novel The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson. 

The author's note is unlike any other author's note I've read... I'll quote it:

"However strange or macabre some of the following incidents may seem, this is not a work of fiction."

This alone intrigued me.

The basic premise of the novel, is alternating chapters. Half of it tells about Daniel H. Burnham, an architect that rose to fame by being one of the key figures in the creation of the Chicago 1893 World's fair, and the other half is devoted to the serial  killer (just blocks away from this fair) living under the alias H.H.Holmes.

I was warned ahead of time that parts may be boring. I found quite the opposite to be true. The whole book was up in the ranks of books that I've read... almost to the level of Jay Scribble.

The Architect's adventures start at being a small Chicago firm, and then arranging all of the best architects in the nation at that time to combine powers to build over 200 structures... with a timespan of less than three years.

This adventure gave new meaning of "down to the wire". But once completed, this world's fair was one of the defining moment's in our nation's history. And it seemed like an awesome time to be alive.

Alive, that is, if you aren't a beautiful young woman seduced by H.H. Holmes. He'd seduce women into working for him, and in some cases marrying him. The marriage count, at my last count, was like 5 wives... with no formal divorce ever finalized...

He'd have these women move into a building of his own design. Once she got too needy, Dr. H.H.Holmes kicked in and, well, killed her. His "Murder Castle" was home to a gas chamber, dissecting table, and of course crematorium.

He admitted to 27 killings, and only 4 were ever confirmed, with one estimate reaching 200. If you're as fascinated in this, I'd highly recommend reading Wikipedia about it...

I highly recommend the book... get it from a local library or something.

So that's all for now... Have you read the book? Comment!

#Hashtagging, Texting, and Explaining JayScribble

So I was watching NCIS on CBS (No, they don't pay me to say it, its just what is always on at my house for some reason...) and in the bottom left I saw during like the first two minutes of the show "#NCIS" which to anyone who is unfamiliar with the internet or Twittering (Tweeting? Tweetering?) doesn't know what this means.

Anyway, about Julyish my friend Dave introduced me to this idea of kind of "Tagging" things in facebook, twitter, etc. posts. The idea was, you place a Pound Sign (#) before whatever you wanted to tag the post with, and then people could search the tag and see how many other people had the same tag.

Here a few months ago, I find that I was only a small part of this idea, and that it's on Twitter (Yeah, I'm on twitter, feel free to follow me @AlexPopichak). I also found out that if you go to the web version of twitter, you can click on a hashtag and it'll take you to a thing where you see the Hashtag's search page. I don't think there's anything yet for #The2015Blogger. Hmm...

So on an unrelated note, I have been texting like crazy for the past few weeks. I have found that I am quite good at texting, albeit almost never in a timely manner. It helps a lot that I have a keyboard cellphone, though.

Anyway, my teacher claimed that text communication and internet communication are a step backward as far as communication goes. I have to say I disagree with that. At first we only had talking. The only way to reach someone was to think of something, then form it with your mouth, and then hope they interpret what you really mean. Then we had this thing called writing, with the same aim, only using physical characters instead of words. This made it easier to get a point across, because you didn't need to rely on the telephone (the game, not the instrument) method or be everywhere at once. Now we have texting.

In my opinion, texting is the closest thing we can get to telepathy. It combines the ideas of writing with the words coming straight from the mind. I might be going out on a limb, but I believe I have some form of a point here.

So the next best thing to telepathy or actually being in a place in person (and I hope you'll agree with me on this one) is appearing via video. Jay Scribble and his brother do this once a week.

Anyway, JayScribble did this series in his Vlogbrothers videos back in 2010 regarding the French Revolution. I enjoyed it personally (although he talks really fast) because it got all of the information in your head in a memorable way with visual aid.

So we were studying the French Revolution in class, and I asked my teacher (She prefaced class with "we're watching a video today") if she was talking about some dry half-hour video with a video sheet. She was. So I introduced her to JayScribble and his French Revolution series. I just asked her to take a look at it.

My American Cultures teacher prefaced her class the following day with "We're watching a video series today that Alex found." And then for the next half hour we covered the entire French Revolution a la John Green. At the end of the series she made the comment that she feels that she talks REALLY SLOW in comparison to JayScribble.

I find it ironic that about a month before that, he had created a World History series on a separate channel. You can check that out online at YouTube.com/CrashCourse.