When I was a Fresh­man, I had an undy­ing inter­est in com­put­ers.  The first few months of my fresh­man year had enthralled my first ever attempt at build­ing a com­puter and as a result, I was sim­ply obsessed with vir­tu­ally all aspects of com­puter hard­ware.  As cus­tom­ary for most fresh­men, in a dire attempt to “become involved” and “make friends” I opted to join Mater Dei’s com­puter club hop­ing to meet peo­ple who were as com­pe­tent and intel­lec­tu­ally inclined about com­put­ers as I was. Now, most peo­ple may not know this,  but I am deathly shy, and as a fresh­men with only few friends at Mater Dei, I was prob­a­bly one of the most intro­verted peo­ple on cam­pus.  Keep­ing my shy­ness as fac­tor, going to this com­puter club meet­ing was a big deal for me as it took courage to step out of my very thin com­fort zone, and a lot of effort to coör­di­nate the ordeal with my car­pool.  I show up at the Mul­ti­me­dia lab with a heavy and anx­ious heart, not know­ing what this com­puter club would hold for me. Lo and behold after all my inner strug­gles and wor­ries, I view a hastily hand­writ­ten sign read­ing “Com­puter Club meet­ing can­celed, moved to next week”.  Lit­tle did I know that this instance would become an omen of my rela­tion­ship with Owen Dana Kuemerle.

Vow­ing never to be a part of a club which can­celed meet­ings so cal­lously,  I found myself show­ing up to the resched­uled meet­ing the fol­low­ing week. At the meet­ing, I met three pecu­liar peo­ple. The first was Alex Guichet, who I had known from my PE class, but did not real­ize his inter­est in com­put­ers. The sec­ond was Mr. Mil­lis, who is quite pos­si­bly one of the coolest teach­ers on cam­pus. The final per­son was Owen Kue­merle, our bum­bling incom­pe­tent pres­i­dent at the time. I remem­ber our first com­puter club meet­ing, mainly because it was our only com­puter club meet­ing that year. Owen went about try­ing to intro­duce him­self with­out gain­ing too much atten­tion from the five peo­ple in the club. He then went on to hastily elect/ appoint offi­cers, and after that he started his agenda.  On Owen’s agenda was installing a leaked beta ver­sion of Vista on one of our Multi Media Lab Com­put­ers. Since those com­put­ers only had 256MB of RAM, and Vista needed at least 512MB to install (though it could run on 256MB), we had to crack open two of the mul­ti­me­dia lab com­put­ers and do a RAM trans­plant for the com­puter that was get­ting Vista.  The only rea­son why I men­tion this in such great detail is because I was inter­ested in build­ing com­put­ers at the time, and see­ing the inside of the com­puter, was very much like  see­ing  “Star Wars” for the first time,  it was unforgettable.

After our one meet­ing for that year, I fig­ured I wouldn’t see too much of Owen ever again. Even if I did, Owen was a Sopho­more and who would he be to remem­ber a dev­il­ishly shy fresh­man like myself.  The swim sea­son came around and given my shy man­ner­isms at the time, I was very ner­vous. Not only was this my first time par­tic­i­pat­ing in a high­school sport, but I knew no one on the team, and essen­tially con­sid­ered myself a nobody. Our first day of prac­tice starts, and I am stand­ing out­side the pool deck alone, not know­ing a sin­gle per­son on the team, when the famil­iar face of Owen Kue­merle walks up to the deck. My eyes imme­di­ately meet his and he asks “Oh you’re doing swim­ming too?”. I con­firmed that I was and I can’t remem­ber much past that. Believe it or not, the fact that I knew at least some­one on the team meant the world for me at the time, and the fact that Owen remem­bered me from our sin­gle com­puter club meet­ing was also impres­sive. Of course, see­ing as how this is Owen Kue­merle we’re talk­ing about, my time of know­ing some­one on the team was short lived, since he quit the team on the sec­ond day of prac­tice. After that I saw Owen on occa­sion, but didn’t really say too much to him aside from small conversation.

Sopho­more year came around, and I was enter­ing my design class on the first day of school,. To my sur­prise who else do I see when I walk in? Owen Kue­merle.  Now for what­ever rea­son, Owen and I both had a “Fuck yeah, we’re in the same class” men­tal­ity, even though we really had not known each other that well. Regard­less, Owen and I sat by each other for the entire year of design and we sim­ply had a blast together. Owen and I seem to have a nat­ural chem­istry. We’re both hard work­ers, share many mutual inter­ests,  have  fairly down to earth views on the world, and we sim­ply have a sim­i­lar notion of what’s right and what’s wrong. Now of course, aside from these base sim­i­lar­i­ties, we are rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Owen is a man scout boy scout, an orga­ni­za­tion which I find lulz wor­thy. He absolutely despises females, and not in the “I’m a badass chau­vin­ist prick” kind of way, but more so in the “I’m too much of a pussy to ask any­one out” kind of way. He only likes to sched­ule one com­puter club meet­ing a year, whilst I have sched­uled mul­ti­ple. Owen has no cell­phone, inter­net,  and up until recently, no com­puter. I have all of these, and three com­put­ers. Owen quit swim­ming,  while I will never quit swim­ming. Finally, and most impor­tantly, Owen doesn’t deliver, while I ALWAYS deliver.

Here’s a list of a few high­lights of that year with Owen.

1. Heck­ling Meghan for being rich

2. Going to the movies and hang­ing out with you each week

3. Help­ing me make my movies

4. Dis­cov­er­ing the great­ness that is “Carrier”

5. Going to home­com­ing and win­ter­for­mal with me

6. When “Kim Bui” asked you out.

7. Rac­ing you to design

8.  Talk­ing about the Apprentice

9. “That’s what she said”

10.  Enjoy­ing the swim sea­son with you after you said you would join the team again

11. Going to all the foot­ball games that you said you would show up at with me

After that year, I truly could say that Owen was one of my best friends. Once again I haven’t the slight­est idea how it hap­pened, it was just nat­ural chem­istry. Junior year came around for me, which in turn was Owen’s senior year and I was a bit sad real­iz­ing that this would be my last year with him.  We both found our­selves in the same class, this time for AP Com­puter sci­ence, and while we didn’t have the absolute blast that we did in design, it was still an enjoy­able class for both of us. Unfor­tu­nately, Owen joined MD TV and much like any girl will do, the class absolutely stole Owen’s soul.  So I will admit that I missed Owen a great deal of the year, but that isn’t to say that we  did not have a great time together. We went a few times to my parent’s office to learn the Whole­hog, which I think was quite fun.  Owen filmed our Red Vs. Gray meet for swim­ming, which was pretty cool.   It was hilar­i­ous hear­ing Owen com­plain about not being able to read this web­site  because it had too many words. In fact I don’t think he’ll even read this trib­ute post since it is so lengthy.Probably most impres­sive was the fact that he showed up to prom, with his date called “Sony” and his best­friend called “Walkie Talkie”. Heck, at Prom Owen even danced with a GIRL.  To be hon­est, far too much has hap­pened this year for me to go into spe­cific details so I’ll sum it all up with this.

There’s only a few times in life that you run into some­one who you can imme­di­ately con­nect with, and enjoy being around. While these peo­ple are rare and often the time spent with them too short, there’s no doubt that their pos­i­tive influ­ence in life will be ever­last­ing. As sur­pris­ing as this is for me, I have to say that Owen cer­tainly is one of these peo­ple. His heart is pure, his work ethic unre­lent­ing, his sense of humor sophis­ti­cated, and his over­all pres­ence ele­gant in an unsus­pect­ing way.  With that, I wish him the best of luck in his col­lege endeav­ors at Min­nesota.  As much as I want to keep in con­tact with him, have him blog about his col­lege life, and email me each week as a pen­pal,  we’re talk­ing about Owen Kue­merle here,  he doesn’t deliver. See­ing as how I could quite pos­si­bly never see him  or talk to him ever again, I would just like to say good­bye man, thanks for all the good times, and no thanks for help­ing me on my films.

I’ve been hell of a busy lately. My AP test for Com­puter Sci­ence is right around the cor­ner, the swim­ming sea­son is draw­ing to a close, and I’m in the midst of shoot­ing a movie. Not only do I hardly have time to go on AIM and engage in stim­u­lat­ing con­ver­sa­tion with Alex in regards to his new 2 Fort 2 Furi­ous inter­net friends (lol?), but I def­i­nitely haven’t had time to keep this blog  up to date.  With this in mind, real­ize  that  I’ve had no inten­tion to update this web­site  until the end of the swim sea­son, and the com­ple­tion of my lat­est movie. How­ever, in the recent weeks me, as well as the rest of human­ity have  stum­bled upon some­thing so moronic, so infu­ri­at­ing, so point­less, that I’ve been com­pelled to write a good old fash­ioned rant on it. It’s called the Swine Flu.

Now for those that some­how escaped the media storm, and in order to rec­tify the notions of those whose brains were fool­ishly manip­u­lated by the brain­stream media (and yes I did say brain­stream), I feel it is nec­es­sary to begin this rant with a bit of a back­ground on the virus.  In mid march sev­eral flu cases involv­ing peo­ple who lived in, or who trav­eled  to Mex­ico began to arise.  After ana­lyz­ing sam­ples taken from these cases, a new strain of the flu virus was declared on April 24,2009. The virus is a strain A or H1N1 type of virus which con­tains two strains of swine, one strain of human, and one strain of bird genes. By April 28,2009 it was esti­mated that the virus had spread to a myr­iad of coun­tries, and that around 4,000 cases of the virus were con­firmed. As of May 1^st, the total esti­mated death toll is around 150 peo­ple although the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion believes that there are only 7 deaths con­firmed to be directly related to the swine flu.

As far as I am con­cerned, this sounds like what hap­pens for vir­tu­ally every dis­ease that ever existed. It starts some­where, and slowly grows as it is spread among organ­isms, this is noth­ing new, it’s been like this since the begin­ning of time.  So why in the hell is the whole world throw­ing a hissy fit over this like it’s going to be the next epi-freaking-demic? First of all, let’s exam­ine the bull­shit that some coun­tries are pulling to try to pre­vent the spread of this virus.

1. Clos­ing off bor­ders and restrict­ing travel to Mexico.

Now this ini­tially sounds like the log­i­cal thing to do. If peo­ple are pre­vented from going to Mex­ico, then the chance of them return­ing with the virus is vir­tu­ally none.  And if the bor­der to Mex­ico is closed, then the chance of Mex­i­cans infected with the virus enter­ing the coun­try is also lim­ited. The funny thing is, it’s now too late to do any­thing to stop the virus,  it has already spread around the world, and as Amer­ica well knows lim­it­ing Mex­i­can access to any coun­try is impos­si­ble.  If Amer­ica can’t stop Mex­i­cans from ille­gally enter­ing our coun­try when things are rel­a­tively peace­ful in Mex­ico, what chance does Amer­ica or any other coun­try in the world have against the remain­ing Mex­i­cans who are now think­ing “Screw this virus, our weak ass health care sys­tem that can’t do a thing to stop it,  and the over­all shiti­ness of this place. Get me the fuck out of this coun­try”. If we thought our prob­lems with ille­gal immi­gra­tion where  hard enough already, I can’t wait to see the tor­rent that comes  now that a virus is pick­ing off Mex­i­cans faster than Thomas can snipe a flock of unsus­pect­ing baby lambs.  To the rest of the world that thinks lim­it­ing travel to Mex­ico is going to do any­thing, it’s too late moth­er­fuck­ers, this virus spread around the world before you even knew it existed. If you wanted to know about the virus ear­lier, you should’ve shared a bor­der with Mexico.

2. Killing every sin­gle pig in the god­damn country.

Being the over reac­tive coun­try in the bunch, Egypt thought it was log­i­cal to kill all 300,000 of their pigs due to the fact that this virus is called the swine flu, and there­fore must come from pigs.  What Egypt prob­a­bly doesn’t know is that this virus also con­tains strains from the bird flu, and the human flu viruses. If they really want to erad­i­cate this thing from their coun­try they bet­ter get to work on killing all 76 mil­lion peo­ple that live there, and God knows the num­ber of birds that they’ll have to kill. Speak­ing of God, I would also like to take this time to recount some of Egypt’s past mis­judg­ments.  They enslaved the Jews even though God and Moses told them that they would plague their ass if they did.  They declared war on Israel when Israel was PMS­ing, and was allied with the U.S. They spent a shit load of time build­ing Pyra­mids and mum­mi­fy­ing their Kings to pre­pare them for the after­life, only to find out thou­sands of years later that their reli­gious beliefs were utterly wrong.  I sup­pose some­thing like this should be expected from Egypt after all, but it is nonethe­less  an exces­sive and com­plete waste of life. I expect PETA to declare war on Egypt after their freak­ing pig geno­cide by the way.

3. Ban­ning the import and sale of pork.

The world health orga­ni­za­tion has explic­itly stated that the trans­fer of this virus is in no way related to the eat­ing, or han­dling of pork prod­ucts. The orga­ni­za­tion even cited sci­en­tific evi­dence that the strains found in this virus are not heat resis­tant nor is con­tact with pork known to inher­ently spread the dis­ease. So what does half the world decide to do? Ban the import and sale of pork. Way to fur­ther crip­ple the world’s fail­ing econ­omy, and put per­fectly inno­cent farm­ing fam­i­lies, and pork related indus­tries into danger.

4.  Mak­ing com­mon sense health advise­ments to avoid catch­ing the virus.

Remem­ber, the best way to pre­vent the spread of the swine flu is to wash your hands, cover your mouth when you cough, and to avoid con­tact with peo­ple who have bla­tant flu like symp­toms. Oh wait, that’s how you pre­vent every other dis­ease in the world from spread­ing also. Thank you Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CSPAN, and the rest of the brain­stream media for spend­ing hours of your news pro­grams inform­ing me to do this. I would have never guessed this would be the best way to pre­vent the spread of the virus.

I real­ize that there are legit­i­mate con­cerns about this new virus, and after all any kind of new dis­ease is not a good thing, but let’s look at this from the num­bers. Out of the 6 bil­lion peo­ple in the world, about 4,000 peo­ple are reported to have the dis­ease. That’s less than six mil­lionths of the total pop­u­la­tion. Of the 4,000 that did have it and the 150 that allegedly died from it, this dis­ease has a fatal­ity rate of 3.75%. If we use the num­bers pro­vided by the world health orga­ni­za­tion in which case only 7 peo­ple have actu­ally died from it.  Then the fatal­ity rate is .175%.  Keep in mind that the major­ity of these cases, and deaths are located within Mex­ico, which has long had a hor­ri­ble health care sys­tem, and con­di­tions that were far below today’s stan­dards for san­i­ta­tion.  So what we’re essen­tially look­ing at is a dis­ease which already has an abysmal death rate, and has only spread so fast because it occurred in a coun­try that can’t even con­tains its’ cit­i­zens, let alone an orga­nized dis­ease pre­ven­tion system.

So please brain­stream media, the mind­less drones who fol­low it, and every­one else in between. Focus your atten­tion on more press­ing mat­ters, like the world’s dying econ­omy, the two wars that are going on, or at the very least a dis­ease that has killed more peo­ple than the swine flu, say diar­rhea.  Unless you are a doc­tor, or a research bio­chemist, there is pos­i­tively noth­ing you can can do to stop the spread of this virus. There’s absolutely no rea­son to flip out about a virus that has killed less peo­ple than spi­der bites have.