Yes that’s right. I have never failed a class in my life.. until now. That class, was Politics and Transformation in the Asia Pacific (POL215). What really sucks is that it was just an elective. I didn’t need to take it… but then again, at the same time, it was space filler. I *only* took it cause I didn’t couldn’t get into the ones I wanted.

Anyway, today I got the last of my marks back. It was the crucial mark too… and I passed! It was History of Modern Espionage, which as I explained in my previous post, if the last history class I will have to take if I passed it.

My GPA dropped almost 0.5, which really sucks. But I’m still in the safe zone to get in to Graduate School if I wanted… amazingly, despite a failure… Though I really would like to raise it up a little bit (at least back to what it was before), and not rely completely on my writing ability to get myself into Grad School, if I needed to go…

Bleh.

Anyway, I don’t want to say it’s clear sailing from now on.. though at this moment in time it really feels that way. Ah well…

So everyone in Canada knows the story about Brenda Martin. Omg I’ve heard it so much that I know it off by heart… 51 years old. Chef for some nab wannabe rich guy who bilked some people outa millions of dollars… got fired… got 25k severance. reinvested some of the severance in to the nab guy’s company. got caught in mexico. In jail for over 2 years waiting trial.

Ok so obviously something went wrong here. There’s no reason for her to be in jail without a trial and such for so long… The Mexicans really screwed it up here… And on that note, probably the Canadian government if it took 2 years for this to come to light. Anyway. the thing is, I heard so much about it, I actually started getting annoyed everytime i heard about it..

And then… and people will be really pissed off with me about this… she get’s convicted of the crime.. And I was like LOL! Hahahaha. I dunno.. I just felt it was really fitting for how much her story was publicized here in Canada… Ok yeah, lemme have it… stone me… But wait.. here’s my beef… Now that she *has* been convicted, and has been returned to Canada under some prisoner exchange… I hear now that she still has to spend a few months in jail…

And I’m thinking… hmm… that doesn’t seem right… First of all… her sentence in Mexico was for 5 years… which should be alot less here in Canada. I mean comon.. we have frigging child molesters who get shorter sentences than that. On top of that… She’s been in pre-trial confinement (technically) for more than 2 years… The rule in Canda is that pre-trial confinement counts for 2-1 ratio towards the sentence.. Meaning, she should get credit for 4 and a half years or for her sentence… Ok so that means she *does* have a few months left in her sentence… But then… There’s the whole parole deal. Obviously she would have qualified for parole by now in a similar circumstance in Canada… and given the circumstances… what, that she didn’t kill anyone and all, most likely she would have been paroled… (I think, but not sure… that parole is 2/3 of the sentence… which would have meant she should have been paroled at 3.5 years… meaning… with the pretrial confinement thing, she shouldn’t be in jail at all!

Phew… Anyway. all that to say that… omg enough with Brenda Martin, I’m sick of hearing about her… But before she fades off into history… why the frig is she still in jail???

Well I’m really down to the final stretch. 30 minutes from now is my first exam of the day… it will be followed by a marathon studying session until my next exam later this evening. Ahh. I’ve pumped one double shot espresso already… I plan to do another sometime this afternoon. Hahaha. Oh man, 12 hours from now and I’m free!

I’m entering hour 13 of this all-day studying marathon. And I have yet to make it through half of the material I needed to read… And tomorrow, I’ll only about half the time to study… and I’ll be quite sleep deprived at that too…

But whatever, that’s just the way it is, I guess… I actually can’t believe the drive I have now to study… makes me think that I really can do it… I can handle school still. But then again, for this class I am going on some pretty serious motivation.. I need to pass this class so that the History portion of my degree will be done with! Ahahaha. Passing this class means, no more history classes ever again! And what a way to end it with as awesome a class as History of Modern Espionage…

Anyway, I am reading through an article about the history of Signals Intelligence in World War II… which is what I wrote my First Term Research Paper on… And what do I come across? This: The solution after Pearl Harbor of Japanese naval codes engendered three critical American victories: the battle of Midway, the midair assasination of Japan’s leading strategist and architecture of Pearl Harbor attack, admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, and the strangling of the island empire through the sinking of its merchant marine… What’s the significance of this? Well the thing is I’d never read this article until today… yet the evidence I used in that research paper were exactly those three! Well almost those three at least…

And I quote from my paper…

“This paper will explore the impact of the use of intelligence derived from decrypted Japanese Naval codes, also known as “Ultra”, on the war in the Pacific. Through an analysis of the assassination of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the naval battle at Guadalcanal, and the destruction of the Japanese merchant fleet (the marus), it will be shown that Ultra was quite a significant factor in the defeat of Japan. While it is not necessarily the absolute cause, it certainly was essential to the victory of the United States over Japan in the Second World War.”

The only difference, the Battle of Guadalcanal… but then again, when I was using that example, I of course had to deal with the Battle of Midway too… So it’s pretty much the same three. Hahaha.

Anyway. I just thought that was really cool… Bleh. Back to studying…