I Am Going Overboard Again, As Usual

I decided to do this blog post because I found a quote that is too absolutely delicious NOT to post on my blog. Here it is, in all its glory:

"There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted."

-- Schopenhauer, Die Kunst Recht zu Behalten

This quote came from a book about global warming, of all things. Guess what I chose to do my research paper on? Yep. I always do choose the craziest things and argue on the least politically correct side. I chose to argue in favor of cholesterol and saturated fats last semester (I was greeted with incredulous stares from my classmates).

I'm only supposed to be writing an outline. Mrs. Howell says she doesn't need sentence outlines, but that's how I'm doing mine, since I tend to think more in sentences. Plus, I'm not terribly fond of sentence fragments ended by a period, though I do use them (sparsely) in my stories. So, a sentence-structured outline it is.

Oh, and did I mention that I am referencing everything in my outline to where I got it so I can find it again later with minimal hair-pulling and that I am going into extreme detail? And I'm only on my third point!

I am currently sitting surrounded by... let me stop to count them... nine books, not counting my own notebook. Three are science textbooks. Two others are books I read 'for fun'. (I have a very strange definition of what can be read 'for fun', including, among other things, philosophy and the random encyclopedia.) The remaining four books I checked out from Collier on Wednesday. I went up there looking for one book and got four: as it turned out, I simply found what can probably be termed 'the global warming section', which contained a very impressive amount of books. I grabbed four that looked interesting. Two are EXTREMELY scholarly (one is a study of the Little Ice Age), and one is absolutely amazing for my paper.

The remaining one looked so hilarious I HAD to check it out. It is entitled The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change and apparently seeks to prove (I haven't read it yet) that cosmic rays, sub-atomic particles from exploded stars, and solar radiation are causing global warming. The book is purple with faint zodiac symbols and lines in the background, complete, oddly enough, with German captions of all things, with a sparkling Earth at the center of them all, set above a sunset-lit tree-filled landscape like some sort of unnatural Sun. The end effect is very New Age-y. I bet they were aiming for that, in the first place.

Anyway, I'm having great fun doing my outline. Seriously, this should not be so much fun. Mrs. Howell is probably going to get more than she bargained for. The outline is at 6 pages so far and I'm not quite halfway done. Did you know grain once grew in Greenland, or that the Romans once had vineyards in Northamptonshire, England? I didn't either. You can glean such fascinating tidbits from such seemingly boring books.

My research paper also includes the infamous ozone layer hole. Ozone is chemically O3, and toxic to breathe. It's a good thing it's up in the atmosphere. I also seem to recall, though can't find it anywhere for the life of me, that the nice smell we associate with bread baking is actually the smell of ozone. Go figure.

So, how are the rest of you doing with your research papers?

In Pace Christi,

Elyse