Cspan is my new favourite channel.

So I'm about halfway through reading This Boy's Life, a memoir by Tobias Wolff, a writer David Sedaris told me about a while ago. "I really liked Tobias Wolff," he had said, "I tried to write like him but I realized my fatal flaw.. I can't write like Tobias Wolff because I am not Tobias Wolff. I never had his friends or his memories or his family and thus I cannot capture the heart that he puts into his writing."
...Or something like that.
But I can see where Toby and David are alike in their styles, at least in what I have read of them. When talking about their lives and memories, both Wolff and Sedaris describe certain times in their lives and their feelings about them.
Instead of Tobias saying his stepfather was a drunken fool and leaving it at that, He explained many different situations involving waiting in the car for hours outside a pub and clutching the seat with white knuckles as they swerved and jerked through traffic all the way home.
The vivid image both Sedaris and Wolff paint of their lives for you let you get very close to the characters. You develop a kind of hatred for the people that were cruel to Tobias in his childhood. You feel the frustration of David and his classmates trying to explain the concept of easter to someone who speaks a language you hardly understand.
What I like most about Tobias's memior though, is how clear of a picture he can paint for me of what his life was like. I think it's valuable information to have: Knowing how different the world was forty years before you were born.





This morning I started working on a programme to learn Spanish called Rosetta Stone.
I've finished the first unit with all A's (I think my lowest score was a 92). I like the way they have of showing you the sentence, saying the sentence aloud and then giving you four pictures to choose from.
For instance, the sentence might be "Un Gato y un carro" followed by four pictures: a boy and a girl, a boy riding a horse, three tennis balls, a cat next to a car.
Using this method of teaching, I've been able to learn in one day the words for colours and numbers and how to recognize things like "the old house is pink", "The little girl is drinking milk at the table" and "the horse is running and jumping".
Regardless of the very few situations I can think of where I would need to use the words "The elephants are swimming", at least it's a start.
I guess in the beginning I'll need to learn some random words before I can actually put them together to make a sentence I might actually need like "Can I borrow five bucks?" and "Where is the nearest bookstore?"

I just remembered I was supposed to write this in an actually intelligent manner. oops. oh well. here:
Today I watched Tony Blair tell a bunch of English/Irish/Scottish dudes about his plan to stop money-laundering in casinos. No? Well, I tried to be serious.