Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

"National Institute of Mental Health!" Rebecca yelled. She was so pleased to have figured this out early in the book, but we never found out if Robert O'Brien agreed.

I had grown up watching the Don Bluth animated video, but I don't think I had ever read this book. We got a copy on cd and listened to it on our trip to Oregon and really enjoyed this book. I only vaguely remembered the plot of this book from the movie, but couldn't remember any details. However, the few details I remember must be the only similarities between the two. This is definitely a case where the book is much better than the movie.

Mrs. Frisby is a field mouse who has a problem. The early spring means that the farmer will be plowing his fields soon and her current home is in the middle of the field. Easy enough, she's supposed to move, right? Except that one of her sons is recovering from pneumonia and if he leaves the home, he's toast for sure. So her task is simple: figure out how to save her son without letting him leave the cinder block they call home.

The interesting thing about this book is that it's one of those classic stories which can be enjoyed by the age group it was written for, but they probably won't pick up on the philosophical overtones this book has in its discussions of sustainability and evolution. I'm sure none of that was in the movie (it's a real kids movie after all), but the discussions with the rats on community viability and human civilization development were my favorite parts. Without being dogmatic, this book did a great job of presenting some very interesting ideas while still tending to a good storyline.

It had everything we could want: good storyline, things to think about and talk about after reading the book, and especially moments where Rebecca and I just had to squeeze each other's hand and hope that things turned out okay in the end.

My head hurts. And I'm sick of School.

Both of us are.

My friend jon sent me this quote. I agree with Justice Kennedy's assessment of why producers make unsubstantial movies.

"Movies, I think young people misjudge. If you ask high school students what are good books, they usually come up with fair answers, the books they get in college prep courses. So they usually recite some of those types. Scarlet Letter? Excellent! Walden Pond? Terrible, I think. My own choice, I don't like it. But movies? They have no concept that great movies have an ethical development; a spiritual awareness happens to the character. They think movies are just entertainment. And so -- Old? Forget it! Subtitles? Forget it! Black and white? Forget it! They think of movies as having special effects for momentary entertainment, and that's very sad. I'm afraid the producers think of it that way, too, and that's very sad, because movies are a wonderful way to teach about human struggle, human conflict, human reconciliation, human atonement."

See Academy of Acheivement.

I found this quote on engadget.com.

Westchester County Executive Andy Spano’s got a new law, y’all, one “to protect the public from crimes such as identity theft and other consumer fraud,” by way of requiring all commercial WiFi hotspots be encrypted. Yes, the argument can be made that unsuspecting users might find valuable personal information stolen on such open wireless networks like at their local cafe, but truth be told, this risk rings true of any non-trusted network — wired, wireless, encrypted or otherwise. And considering that WEP encryption is a total joke to crack, such a law seems more like a gesture (and PR move) than a solution. Besides, pretty much everybody knows that you take your information into your own hands when you connect to an untrusted network of any kind, and we suspect it follows that those who aren’t aware of this probably aren’t aren’t too knowledgeable when it comes to encrypting their WiFi connection anyway.

via engadget, yo

Sounds to me like someone is trying to shut down all those cities and counties who are setting up their public WiFi access. Someone = lawyers of comcast and qwest.

If corporations are legally considered 'persons', why are we not able to prosecute them as legal 'persons'? I know it sounds childish, naive, etc., but shouldn't corporations go to jail for theft, obstruction of justice and even second degree manslaughter?

It's amazing how just one short weekend can set you back so far in school/work. I think it's a combination of not working on homework and work projects for 3 days, plus falling behind on sleep due to 2 15 hour drives. At any rate, one of my professors on Tuesday asked me how I was doing (since I got to the classroom a few minutes early and he likes to chit-chat with the early birds), and I replied that I was tired. He didn't think I should be tired because "you got an extra hour of sleep, didn't you?" Ha. Ha. Very funny. Although, I do remember being glad to notice that instead of arriving home at 3am last Sunday night/Monday morning, my computer said it was "only" 2am. And I'm only just now recovering. Maybe I'm too old to go to school anymore if it takes me a week to recover from one night of 5 hours sleep. :)

Anyway, needless to say, I spent most of the week struggling to catch up with school projects and grading other people's projects and exams. And trying to decide whether we could make it to Texas for my grandma's funeral. It was a tough decision, but I finally decided that 2 more 18 hour trips and 2 more days of not being able to work on my many projects would just be too much. Hopefully Grandma understands.

Still not caught up, though I made some good progress yesterday. My project due on Tuesday is done (or rather, as done as I would like to make it), and the one due tomorrow I will have to start tomorrow, and use up three of my "free" late days to hopefully finish on Thursday. Bleh. Only five more weeks of classes. At least the projects are interesting, even if they take a long time to do. The one due tomorrow is a statistical parser, meaning it will use statistics to decide how to parse a sentence, where the noun phrases are and how they combine with verb phrases and lots of other parts of speech that I'm not even sure I see the difference. The next one will be a machine translation system (translating sentences from one language to another)....

Well that's the long way of saying that what we did this week was school work. :) There was some other stuff in there too I think. Mutual of course. It was a very loud activity, and not just because we were playing games. The loudest girls were the ones who were waiting for their turn. Ah well. At least they had fun.

We watched "Arsenic and Old Lace" on Halloween...in the background of doing homework of course. :) And Friday night was the ward carnival; I was in charge of the pie eating contest, which I'm glad it turned out alright in the end because it was a bit stressful putting it on. The ward does the pie eating contest traditionally in pairs...blind fold one person, who stands behind the person eating the pie, and give the blind folded person a spoon to feed their partner. It was very messy, but it looked like people had fun. I was glad they all knew the rules, because I didn't know the rules until I watched the event - which was part of my worry about the activity. :)

And we saw Jon and Faith briefly Saturday night, since they were in town for a wedding. We went to the reception and played Fluxx. The best way to enjoy wedding receptions, in my opinion - bring a game to play. :)

Anyway, hope you all are doing well. I can't wait for Christmas break and next semester!
-Becca and Wayne

New version of flock just came out and they updated some features on their blogger. I'm not sure what else they have updated, but this thing is really working great! Heads up to all of you out there.
Update: after looking closely at their blogging functions, I'm quite pleased with the features. They fixed the interface to do a better job of offering categories in MT. However, their code is a bit messy when you check to see what HTML they put into the entry. Still, for the average user, this is a perfect program for simply writing your thoughts down and posting them on your site.

While in Florence, Oregon this year, I had planned to do some site specific art. However, I have learned that a site which has as much emotional connection in a certain way to me as does Florence makes it very difficult to think of the site in any other way. Florence is a place of contemplative thought and mourning for me, making "art" difficult.

This was a performance/land piece I did while on the beach at Devil's Elbow. Appropriately named place, it can be a place of violent oceanic turbulence. This quality fit well the piece I did, measuring the tide with stones. I was measuring the movement of the tide by marking the end of the waves with stones over the period of a half and hour. The line shifted and blurred as the ocean refused to be measured. The video didn't turn out as well as I had hoped and poor Rebecca's shoes got soaked. I should have thought to get a tripod.

In this video documentation of the piece, you will see a condensed version of me running and marking the waves location. I particularly enjoyed the movement of the line of stones as the waves undulated. After seeing the video, I was astonished at the beauty of the sunset and the coastline reflecting the beauty in the sky.

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I have been told by friends and friends of Mckell Brockbank that they would like to see the place where he died. I have tried in the past to capture the beauty of the place, but never been able to do it justice (or even finish the project). This trip, however, was the 5th year anniversary of his death. I felt like if Mac were alive today, he would have filmed this place many times over. So I decided to do what was most obvious: just film it as it is.

It's not a very interesting video, but it does show the serenity as well as the turmoil of the location. I kept the file size larger than normal so you can see the details.

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Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as theprotective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. Weinvestigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a samplegroup of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average allhelmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions(either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from thecranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatlyamplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bandsreserved for government use according to the Federal CommunicationCommission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets mayin fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate thatthe government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

This is the third stage in this series of paintings. Some new paintings. Karl let me borrow his projector and I used some of the 3D characters I built in Swift 3D. I also introduced some images from airline safety cards. I think those images get more to the root of where these ideas came from.

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This afternoon, Rebecca and I drove out to Lincoln Point in Utah county and installed some prayer flags around one of the jetty points. When we woke up this morning, I noticed that the wind was very strong. We searched on Google Earth for directions this time (last time we drove everywhere when we tried to find Lincoln Point). When we got there, the waves were large, the water was grey and everything was perfect. This was probably the best visual experience; the coherence of the line added strength to the visual feel of the piece. I think I'd like to redo this piece in similar fashion.

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Rebecca spent most of this week programming and finishing her project at the last possible minute. It was especially tricky because she had mutual on Wednesday evening. For mutual, they did a "cultural heritage" night and each girl brought in something that related to thier cultural heritage. Rebecca decided to bring in a buttercreme cake and talk about Germany. The cake was a huge success (one of the girls wanted the recipe) and I only got a piece by luck.

Friday night, we went to BYU's student film festival "Final Cut". This is our last year that we are able to go. Again, most of the films were horrible but you don't go to see a lot of good films, you go to try and find the few gems that might be there. I have decided that the film students are really good at what they do here. The actors in the films aren't so great. But where the films really break down is the writing. The screenwriters are absolutely horrible and their dialogue never flows...I groaned through most of the films.

But a couple of them are really quite ingenious.

We have learned that our cat is scared silly of the noise our heater makes. She knows when the heater is about to come on [a small noise right before the big rushing noise of air] and races to hide under the bed. However, since we usually shut our door when we leave, she's had to find other places to hide, which aren't as good as under the bed. [Like under a chair. Not quite as good cover, but she thinks it is safer there from the heater monster.]

Yesterday, we drove out to Lincoln Point (on Utah Lake) to put up another variation on a sculpture project we've been working on. I got wet and nasty in the water and Rebecca was cold, but we had a lot of fun. We came home, watched a couple of movies [while working on homework in the living room] and then went to bed. Nothing terribly exciting. But as this semester starts to come to a close (is it already that time?!), we'll become more and more busy with school. [no one told me it was going to get MORE busy!! Oh dear... - beck]

Have a good week!

After discussing the principles behind an aesthetic experience, my 480r class went outside and created a situation where we might be able to have an aesthetic experience. We originally wanted to put the sand on a pedestal on the middle of BYU's quad, but the gallery director explained that the BYU grounds are outside of his jurisdiction. So, we put the sand on the ground in a pile and watched people walking by.

Highlights:

• At one point, some random kid walked up to the pile and stepped on it. Watch Jessica's reaction in the background.


• After the pile was destroyed, more people payed attention to it when they walked by.


• Two guys came and stopped at the pile, discussing it (among other things).


• Jessica emotionally went and rebuilt the piece, asking for help.


• When Molly put a football ticket in the pile, more people paid attention to it.


• Jethro rebuilt the piece in a circle, adding to its visual aesthetic appeal.

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Lion House Potatoes

6 Potato
3 Tbsp Margarine
1 Can Cream Of Chicken Soup
1 Cup Sour Cream
1/2 Cup Milk
3 Tbsp Green Onion, chopped
3/4 Cup Sharp Cheddar Cheese, shredded
2 Tbsp Margarine, melted
3/4 Cup Corn Flakes, crumbled

1. Peel potatoes, boil, cool and shread into casserole dish.
2. Combine margarine, soup, sour cream, milk, green onions and cheese. Warm in a sauce pan and spread over potatoes.
3. Combine melted margarine and corn flakes. Sprinkle on top.
4. Bake 30 minutes at 325 degrees.

Lemon Sauce

1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter
2 T water
1 egg well beaten
3 tea lemon juice

Combine all ingredients, heat to boil over low heat stirring constantly.

chicken tortilla soup

1 can chicken broth
1 can black beans
1 1/2 cups picsweet frozen corn
1 1/2 cups chopped tomatoes
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 large clove garlic, minced
taco seasoning to taste

Put all the ingredients together in a pot and warm on the stove. While this is warming, make some homemade chips (these are the best!).

3 TBS oil
15 corn tortillas

Chop or tear up a stack of 15+ corn tortillas, and fry them in hot oil. Once they start to turn brown, put them onto a paper towel to soak up the oil. Season with salt to taste. Make however many of these you want. Rebecca likes to snitch mine. :)

Put the soup in a bowl and top with sour cream, cheese and the chips.

This week we've worked on survival. For today, we each prepared a lesson for our classes and a talk for Sacrament meeting, and were glad to hear they didn't need us to speak in the East Lake care center after all. I guess they have a branch in the local care center, and each ward in the stake alternates who is responsible for providing people to talk, pass the sacrament, and help the folks to the meeting room (down the hall from all of their rooms). They had booked two sets of speakers accidentally, so I just attended with the young women and got to listen. Giving a talk once a day is more than enough for me. :) But it was fun to go with the young women to the branch and visit with the people at the care center a bit.

The rest of the week was school as usual. We did a bit of window shopping on Saturday. Karl and Angela are coming over later today. We almost went to SLC Friday for a walk through some of their galleries, but felt too rushed and ended up vetoing the idea.

We're also working on compiling a final list of schools for Wayne to apply to, so we can hand the list over to professors writing recommendation letters soon and get applications put together before the end of December. I think most of the applications are due mid-January to mid-February, but it can't hurt to start now. It's just tricky finding time for MFA applications in the midst of finishing the semester and trying to propose a thesis.

I'm getting closer to proposing a thesis (why does this have to take so long??). I have half of the paper written, and a couple more weeks of "preliminary results" stuff to work through. It amazes me how much they want me to have done before even officially proposing a topic, but whatever. I guess they think of it as a "contract" (if you do everything you proposed to do, we'll have to let you graduate), so the more evidence you have that your idea is a valid one and a good one, the better. The current thesis topic I'm working on is a narrower scope than the original idea I started with a year ago. Specifically, how to generate unique paraphrases given a sentence; rewording a sentence to somehow still "mean the same thing." I'm using a combination of machine translation tools and statistically identified syntactic structures to create them. Well, right now I'm trying to get the baseline system in place, and struggling because the tools are meant to be used on a different type of computer than the one I've been given to use in the lab. Fun huh? :)

I can't think of much else going on right now. But hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving!

-Becca and Wayne

Luna's Cheese Bowl

16 oz cream cheese
16 oz sour cream
1/4 c. margarine
1 bunch green onions
2 c. cheddar cheese
3 cloves garlic
1 bread bowl.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Melt butter and sauté garlic. Mix in rest of ingredients. Stuff in bowl. Double wrap with aluminum foil and bake at 350 degrees for 2 hours.

Two more weeks of school. I don't know how we're going to finish what we need to in that time, but at least then it will be over and we can look back at everything, instead of feeling its weight on our shoulders.

We had Wednesday off from school, but we worked all day; I guess Rebecca still went to school to write a large paper, but she didn't have classes. So, despite the break from school, we took no breaks. Rebecca had mutual at night, but once she got back from it, we decided to go to a dollar movie and take a break. When we got to the theater, the line was very long and in the cold, but we couldn't make up our minds if we wanted to go home or just stick it out. As a result, we ended up staying. And a good thing too, because The Brothers Grimm has to be the best movie we've seen all year. For me personally, it's one of the best I've seen in a long time. We highly recommend people to see it (most likely it's out of the theaters, but it comes on DVD December 20th - we already looked that release date up!). But we can't stop thinking and talking about this movie. Everywhere we go, we keep bringing it up to each other. Very good movie. Ten stars. [Eleven! :) -beck]

Thursday morning, we woke up early and drove to Evanston, Wyoming for Thanksgiving lunch. Grandma Harris likes for us to be there early, but we didn't get out the door until around nine in the morning. But I must have driven faster than normal because we were there by 10:30. All of Provo looked like a ghost town and there wasn't a soul on the roads, so maybe that helped speed things up.

Thanksgiving meal was nice and we chatted with cousins and aunts and uncles. After eating too much, we drove home and did our best to stay awake on the road. It is difficult driving back home after a large thanksgiving meal because I get sleepy after the meal. Somehow we managed to stay awake. The rest of Thursday we spent doing nothing (probably homework, but who knows anymore); but we did put up our Christmas tree and decorations. Rebecca was so excited that we spent the night sleeping in our sleeping bag underneath the tree with the lights on. [yay for Christmas!! :):):) -beck]

Friday, we actually went out to do some errands. I can't stand Black Friday, but I do enjoy spending time with Rebecca, so I figured we could go. [my glasses broke while I was wearing them Wednesday afternoon - I swear I wasn't doing anything else! I just heard a little pop, and took off my glasses to see what happened, and the earpiece fell off in my hands. Friday was the soonest we could catch people at the glasses store to try and fix them. -beck] But when we got back, it was back to the grindstone for the next 24 hours.

This evening, Rebecca has a young women meeting for church and then we're going over to Karl and Angela's for dinner. Rebecca is worried that she didn't make enough brownies (for the young women). We wish everyone a great week.
-Wayne and Rebecca

Sundays are such great days. I really love them. I feel so rejuvinated after a good Sunday.