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Jason 
Email: (link disabled)
Location: Missouri, United States
(website programmer)
On This Site
I live in small-town, middle-class U.S.A. so I haven't much
personal experience with poverty. But I am seriously troubled
seeing blatant wastes of money on television, as though Americans
don't recognize that there's a poverty problem and don't have the
least bit of benevolence. I see rock stars dressed in ugly,
uncomfortable $10,000 clothes smashing $10,000 guitars on stage for
fun, and I think, "He could have bought a decent guitar, jeans, and
a T-shirt for about $215.99. That means he just wasted $19,784.01
that he could have given to a charity or something, but chose
instead to use it to make himself look like an idiot on national
television. $19,784.01 buys a lot of bread in Somalia. Examples of
wasted money like this are all around, and they really annoy
me.
Americans in general don't seem to realize that people in other
countries are human. The Serbian army shoots Kosovar women and
children by the hundreds, but when did our nation's attention
really turn to the crisis? When three American soldiers were taken
prisoner. That's a tragedy, but isn't the slaughter of innocent
civilians also a bit disturbing? I don't like how the media's
attention focuses on Americans as though they're more important
than people in other countries.
If I was to summarize this site in two words, they would be,
"WAKE UP!" I want people to realize what's going on, because a lot
of Americans have the means to help and simply don't. I want a lot
of people to see this site, so that maybe some of them who don't
understand what's going on under the poverty line might begin to.
So send your friends emails about it. Heck, even send those dreaded
ICQ chain messages! Just get the word out!
My main contribution to the site has been the Dynamic HTML in
the interactive section, though I've helped nitpick through the
details of the design and spiff up the other pages a bit. I spent
last summer teaching myself DHTML and now I've found a great way to
put it to use. Hopefully my special effects will draw the eyes of
some who would have otherwise ignored the site's message.
Biography
I'm eighteen years old and I live in Kirksville, Missouri, for
now. I'm just graduating from high school and in fall of '99 I'm
going to enter Cornell University in Ithaca, New York to study
astronomy. Then I'm going to go to grad school and study astronomy.
Then I'm going to be an astronomer. I would like to be the first
human to set foot on Mars. Besides Elvis, that is.
I'm kidding, of course. I hope to set foot on Mars well before
Elvis.
That brings me to another of my hobbies: humor writing. By the
time you read this, I'll probably have organized my writing,
humorous and otherwise, on my personal homepage at (link disabled).
My other hobbies include tennis, fishing, and web programming
(professionally for a couple of design firms) and watching
Frasier once a week. There's no really clean way to end a quick
biographical blurb like this, so I'll just leave you with the
knowledge that my dog is a Labrador retriever named Shonka.
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