Collage pt.Duex

Collage of the last few weeks.

Holidays and New Years Eve.

My holidays were grand,  not even a snow storm could have ruined it.These are some pictures I took with my new canon elph camera. Its digital and it’s a transition from film, so I don’t think I’ am capable of it’s true potential yet, well that’s what Marcus told me.

Bill, Christa, Joe,  and I went to see
The Flaming Lips,  not to be confused with the medical disease, but an alternative rock band from Oklahoma City, who formed in 1983. They’ve been playing their annual New Years Eve Freakout concert for about three years now, since 2007. I ‘am a huge flaming lips fan, so it was joyous occasion to see them play.






The Opening band was Norman’s own StarDeath&WhiteDwarfs, they sound like Coldplay meets King Crimson. They were really good, I’ve seen them alot live. They played at the 2nd annual Norman Music Festivial and 2009’s Ghouls Gone Wild afterparty over in Bricktown back in October.
The Flaming lips were good,  the setlist was a disappointment, though I’ll talk about that in abit. They replaced their UFO with a Giant Disco Ball, which was different. Actually Wayne Coyne, one of the members of the band built the UFO in his backyard in 2004/2005 with supplies from Home Depot. It was a homage to George Clinton/Paraliment/Funkadelic, George Clinton would have been pround!

The Setlist wasn’t that great besided the new songs off Embryonic and the track “In The Morning of The Magicians” off the Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots LP. But I do love Race for the Prize, a great song to start off with.

Setlist:

Intro
Race For The Prize
Silver Trembling Hands
The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song
Vein Of Stars -> The Firebird Suite
In The Morning Of The Magicians
Convinced Of The Hex
See The Leaves
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Pt. 1 (slow)
Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung
Taps -> The W.A.N.D.
She Don’t Use Jelly
Do You Realize?? (slow)
The Process

They also had balloons in the crowd throughout the whole show, and even more during the Process.

One thing about the concert which made it such a spectacular event was the midnight preformence of Pink Floyd’s Darkside Of The Moon.  One track I didnt really like was Money,  it came off sounding like Black Moth Super Rainbow since I heard it before the concert I had already made up my mind on how I felt about it.

Here’s afew pictures from the show.
The guy on left looks like a bigger version of Wayne from The Christmas on Mars film.

Diversity!

The topic of January is “Diversity. You’d ask yourself is that even relevant to the curriculum? In  fact it’s very relevant to our curriculum, and our class; including the  student body of the Francis Tuttle campus, and our home school.

My peers in the class room come from all different backgrounds, some of those backgrounds I can identify with, others I cannot identify with.  By logic I cannot, they do things differently, different religion, race, creed.  However that little reason is so insignificant when it comes to something like their personality, which is a very significant to liking them. They have very polished personalites, which I can see and enjoy.

Diversity can give us valuable knowledge to how other people live their lives. How they cope, rejoice, respond to a conflict or presence  of another person. You could basically dissolve it down to the phrase “Walking in some else’s shoes” for  better comprehension. A countless number of people in the world are put down or suffer some form of discrimination, but if we could ignore the difference and just see ourselves as people then we wouldn’t have such meaningless conflicts in the world; in our society, or in our community, it would be nonexistent.  However, discrimination still prevails!

Though discrimination still prevails we can show the people with despairing views on diversity how it could adavance our society, not just emotionally but also give us emotional intelligence. Understanding of others could give us some insight of  how the world operates to a degree where the conflicts of prejudice that do occur would easily be resolved.

Nieva, Nieva!

Compassion.

Compassion is defined as a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.

If you’re reading this you’d probably ask yourself , “Lukas Shepard has compassion?!?!”. Well yes I do have compassion, we all do. Compassion is a human feeling/emotion that our species feels, sometimes we forget that. Even I forget about compassion, I could get very vexed at someone who’s not participating due to grief or stress, but would being furious towards them solve anything? No, We could go forever without talking about it or each other, but being frank about it and showing compassion towards that certain person’s problem just gives me this feeling in my heart. A stir of kindness which sends my heart through the roof.

We all have differences, that sometimes gets in the way of our vision to come and work together. If we didn’t show compassion towards each other, where would we be? Not that far. There will always be roadblocks in our lives that we cannot get around by ourselves, but we do have others who are there to guide us.
Being there to guide someone out of their misfortunes is compassion, its a human response, you just can’t just bathe in misanthropy.

In fact these are all bona fide statements that I think about when being compassionate.

I cant wait for Decemeber 31st.

Guest blogger: Bill Clifton, aka “Cousin Bill”

Greetings,

I am Bill Clifton, Lucas’ cousin on his mother’s side.  I am Lucas’ favorite cousin, because I can name the capitals of every sovereign nation in the former Soviet Union.  Ha!

Frivolities aside, I am here to speak about a very important topic: scissor sanitation.  Our uncle Jerry B cut Lucas’ hair this morning.  Good cut, Uncle Jerry!  Unfortunately, he tagged Lucas’ ear, and blood was spilled.  I told Lucas that it’s not a good haircut if you don’t bleed, but I was just kidding.  Oh well, it was a small cut.  No harm done…

…or was it?  What Lucas did not know is that Grandma was using those scissors to cut turkey and ham earlier that morning.  The ham especially worries me, since uncooked ham is known to carry trichinosis.  I can’t say whether Lucas managed to escape unscathed, but I suspect the worse.  He’s already showing signs of some sort of infection.  Primarily, he’s slowly losing his mind.  It always hits the mind first.  The body follows rather quickly.  I had better start shopping for a black suit.  Well, Lucas was one of my favorite cousins.  It’s a real shame, and that’s why we should all be very conscious of cleaning our scissors.

Lucas, this must be hard for you, but it’s not too late to donate your body to science.  I would love to visit you in a museum.  Just think about it…but not too long.

-Bill C.

 

The whole ghouls gone wild parade caught in one shot.