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I only found out last week that for a couple of decades I’ve been misquoting my favorite lines from Steely Dan’s “Do It Again.” I’d always thought they went Now you swear you’re kickin’ Vegas
That you’re not a gamblin’ man
Then you find you’re back in Vegas
With a handle in your handBut actually, the first line is, “Now you swear and kick and beg us”. It’s a clever rhyme, but what does the “kick” have to do with the rest of it?
Las Vegas is our standard “escape” vacation. When we want to completely forget about our usual lives or a couple days, but don’t feel like accomplishing anything, that’s where we’ll find ourselves, as we did this weekend. LV hotels will offer you fantastic deals if you show a little loyalty. We get free rooms on weeknights and drastically reduced rates on the weekends, plus (typically) a $30 food voucher. And we’re not even big gamblers or anything. The only reason we show on their gambling radar at all is that I play vast amounts of video poker, which is formally considered a slot machine even though the house advantage on video poker is minuscule compared to slots. I’ve mastered the strategy for video poker (regular Jacks or Better and its more big-pay-oriented sibling, Double Double Bonus Poker) well enough that I can play well and zone out at the same time. For me it’s a kind of active meditation: I deal and hold, deal and hold while letting my subconscious take me wherever it wishes. Consequently, I can offline and generate good karma with the hotel simultaneously.
The California Hotel in downtown LV still amuses me. For some reason, despite the name, they cater heavily to Hawaiian tourists. The banks of video poker machines all have names like Pau Hana Poker and Shaka Five Way. (The latter used to be festooned with a pair neon signs of perpetually back-and-forth tilting hands with thumb and pinky fingers extended, in the universal “Hang Loose” sign.) A new promotion is the Diamond Head Jackpot quarter video poker: Any sequential royal flush in diamonds, ascending or descending, pays a whopping $25,000. (The probability of such an event, assuming optimal strategy for standard Jacks or Better, is about 1 in 10 million.) We don’t gamble at the Cal. The real payoff of its Hawaiian theme, for us, is the food—for its overall deliciousness as well as the novelty. How many mainland American coffee shops do you know of whose salad bars prominently feature edamame, sushi and that delectable, bland Hawaiian macaroni salad? Not to mention a gigantic, misshapen football of wasabi—with no explanation or warning whatsoever? You’ve heard of the Tar Baby from B’rer Rabbit—this is the Wasabi Baby: get stuck to it and before you can free yourself, your sinuses are toast. Among the available breakfast meats are grilled Spam and Portuguese sausage. Just this trip I discovered that in addition to the Hawaiian fast-food joint upstairs, the small burgz-’n’-dogz snack bar on the main floor also sells cans of Hawaiian Sun guava nectar—and it seems to be open nearly 24 hours. Doesn’t sound like much but I can’t possibly overemphasize the value of an ice-cold guava nectar on the rocks late at night, to slake the near-deadly thirst after taking on 10 g of sodium from a pub-style dinner.
When I was a postdoc in Seattle, a colleague—who, like us, visited LV frequently—frequently voiced his opinion that the Circus Circus Hotel's buffet was the most vile, disgusting place to eat on the face of the planet. (And he had spent his childhood in Nigeria.) We both really liked classic rock, too, so when “Do It Again” came on the radio once I couldn’t resist getting in a dig: Now you swear you’re kickin’ Vegas
That you’re not a total jerk-us.
Then you find yourself in Vegas
Eating lunch at Circus Circus!
Here’s this trip’s Las Vegas Decadence Scoreboard: Free virgin strawberry daiquiris: 15 Cases of acute acid stomach from drinking too many of the previous item: 2 Cans of guava nectar: 3 (Only 3? Yeah, but they weren’t free, or even cheap) Hot fudge sundaes with Kona Coffee ice cream: 1 Most money paid for a meal for two after discounts & perks: About $15 Least paid: $0 Net gambling win: $20 Hours of fun had: Many
Flying Southwest Airlines from the Midwest generally involves a transfer at Chicago Midway. For a truly harrowing experience, all you need to do is watch out the window on final approach to any of Midway’s runways. We landed on Runway 4R on our way back from LV. The last minute coming in scared the bejesus out of me, and I have a private pilot license. A half mile or so out, we passed over a large railroad yard and industrial park. Alreay, the tall clusters of orange security lamps seemed to rise halfway to the airplane, but I knew from experience it was an optical illusion; we were still a couple hundred feet up. I began to worry when we passed the industrial park, and instead of the airport’s perimeter field, we began to cross over a residential neighborhood. We’re now practically skimming our wheels on roofs, and still the houses continue to hurtle past underneath. I couldn’t quite read the license plates of the last three cars before the retaining wall shot past, but I could tell which state they were from! I’ve been connecting flights in Chicago regularly for a quarter century now, and I still can’t wrap my mind around how bloody huge the city is. On approach to Midway, I look out and see a grid of orange lines. My brain automatically sets the scale according to how big it things a city should be, and so I perceive that the squares of the grid are city blocks. But when we get close each “block” resolves a square grid of its own; and I realize the bright lines are merely the major streets, set fully eight blocks apart. A moment of disorientation, and then it’s like stepping into the Total Perspective Vortex. During the day, I’ve experienced the same sudden shift of scale, but with completely different visual cues. The residential areas in the central part of Chicago, near Midway, at first seem to be composed of closely-spaced houses, but a closer look reveals the “houses” to be endless rows upon rows of three-story apartment buildings packed in like books on a bookshelf. I find the whole scene horribly depressing. Not because of the density issue—we need more high-density residential areas and less suburban sprawl—but because of the mind-numbing monotony. I can't imagine living where the most exciting part of one’s environment is the inability to fly a kite more than twelve feet in the air for fear it may get entangled in the landing gear of a commercial jet. Tags: las_vegas
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My graduate advisor, R., went to college with a complete lunatic (“CL”). He must have had just a touch of sociopathy—not so much that he couldn’t function in society, but enough to generate, from time to time, spectacular incidents of compulsive irresponsibility.
Laboratories, with their ready availability of implements of destruction, seemed to bring out CL’s worst behavior, which at times bordered on criminal. R. was unlucky enough to be paired with CL in biology lab. He conducted the first half of their two-man worm dissection with meticulous care, while CL dank* around, and having finished, handed it off to CL for continuation. CL grinned evilly, grasped a scalpel in a clenched fist, and began furiously stabbing the half-dissected worm like a maniac on a killing spree: STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-…. Formaldehyde droplets and worm bits flew everywhere.
Naturally, the professor chose that exact moment to stroll by and inspect their handiwork.
Things could have gone worse, as CL’s chemistry lab partner found out. As in the biology class, the innocent lab partner (a.k.a. the “victim”) initiated the actual work, carefully measuring and mixing, while CL idly heated one end of a glass rod over a Bunsen burner. When asked for a clean stirrer, CL casually presented the nearly molten end of his glass rod to his partner.
When asked why the hell he’d done it, CL would only offer the following explanation: “Hot glass looks just the same as cold glass.” Astonishingly, he wasn’t expelled for that stunt.
I hadn’t thought of that story in perhaps over a decade. A couple nights ago, however, we had pasta shells stuffed with a mélange of Italian sausage and ricotta cheese. Five minutes before dinner was ready, I donned my oven mitts, took the piping hot casserole dish out of the oven, sprinkled mozzarella onto the bubbling morass inside, and returned the dish uncovered, tossing the clear glass lid into the sink.
I don’t know what prompted Kathy to start washing the dishes just then. She’s a believer in CL’s hot glass/cold glass theorem, now, too. I wasn’t fast enough to catch her before she grabbed the casserole lid; so I spent the next several minutes apologizing profusely whilst she ran cold water over her singed fingers. Luckily she didn’t even get a noticeable burn. Reflexes still in working order!
____________________
*dank: past tense of dink
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My graduate advisor, R., went to college with a complete lunatic (“CL”). He must have had just a touch of sociopathy—not so much that he couldn’t function in society, but enough to generate, from time to time, spectacular incidents of compulsive irresponsibility.
Laboratories, with their ready availability of implements of destruction, seemed to bring out CL’s worst behavior, which at times bordered on criminal. R. was unlucky enough to be paired with CL in biology lab. He conducted the first half of their two-man worm dissection with meticulous care, while CL dank* around, and having finished, handed it off to CL for continuation. CL grinned evilly, grasped a scalpel in a clenched fist, and began furiously stabbing the half-dissected worm like a maniac on a killing spree: STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-…. Formaldehyde droplets and worm bits flew everywhere.
Naturally, the professor chose that exact moment to stroll by and inspect their handiwork.
Things could have gone worse, as CL’s chemistry lab partner found out. As in the biology class, the innocent lab partner (a.k.a. the “victim”) initiated the actual work, carefully measuring and mixing, while CL idly heated one end of a glass rod over a Bunsen burner. When asked for a clean stirrer, CL casually presented the nearly molten end of his glass rod to his partner.
When asked why the hell he’d done it, CL would only offer the following explanation: “Hot glass looks just the same as cold glass.” Astonishingly, he wasn’t expelled for that stunt.
I hadn’t thought of that story in perhaps over a decade. A couple nights ago, however, we had pasta shells stuffed with a mélange of Italian sausage and ricotta cheese. Five minutes before dinner was ready, I donned my oven mitts, took the piping hot casserole dish out of the oven, sprinkled mozzarella onto the bubbling morass inside, and returned the dish uncovered, tossing the clear glass lid into the sink.
I don’t know what prompted Kathy to start washing the dishes just then. She’s a believer in CL’s hot glass/cold glass theorem, now, too. I wasn’t fast enough to catch her before she grabbed the casserole lid; so I spent the next several minutes apologizing profusely whilst she ran cold water over her singed fingers. Luckily she didn’t even get a noticeable burn. Reflexes still in working order!
____________________
*dank: past tense of dink
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Today's Cool Words:acaciaI've always loved the sound of this word. Exotic, yet easy to say. It's also a very pretty word: all curves and loops, with a dot over the i to offset the single straight letter. I like the actual tree, too, with its sprawling branches supporting a wide crown of leaves. To someone raised among evergreens, the most striking feature of an acacia is its almost perfectly flat top. Nature's Own Bus-stop Shelter. The street next to my hotel in Honolulu was lined with acacias. I made a daily pilgrimage to the mall down the street for lunch via the top parking level, almost level with their tops. That made for a very pleasant walk, mall parking lot notwithstanding. gibbousGibbous can mean "convex" or "hunchbacked", but I've only seen it used in conjunction (heh!) with celestial bodies, in which case it means "more than half illuminated (but not full)." The word has no connection with gibbon, although I often involuntarily make the link in my mind. Waxing gibbous is my second favorite phase of the moon, after, of course, the sliver moon.
Any item offered for sale or as a prize in a contest, whose description includes the word merchandise, is something I can automatically assume I don't want, even for free. This is doubly true of "logo merchandise."
I attended a department mixer this evening at a local bar-and-video-games joint called the Boneyard. I somehow wound up playing Dance Dance Revolution with a couple of grad students and my friend Laura. If they were surprised I was willing to play, they were astonished when I, the oldest by a decade and a DDR virgin, smoked everybody. Nobody had a chance to warn them that they shouldn't mess with an longtime Parappa the Rapper enthusiast.
At one point we tried to imagine my boss, age 77, playing DDR. The most difficult part was to choose an appropriate song. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata would just about do the trick. The little arrows would crawl up the screen at the rate of about one pixel every five seconds.
I find myself at a rather awkward time of life. I still identify more strongly with the senior graduate students than with the faculty who are my own age, and for the usual reason: my colleagues' lives are entirely focused on their children. That's as it should be—but it still means I have no friends my own age within 75 miles of home. My faculty position and somewhat advanced age keep me from making friends among the graduate students, like I did at the U of Washington (with one exception, but she's no longer a grad student, and wasn't in my department). I'm not so old that playing DDR with grad students pushes any boundaries of creepiness. And as long as I wear a hat, I look somewhat younger than I am. In ten years, it would most definitely emit creepy vibes, but with luck, in ten years my age group will all have sent their kids off to college, and can begin to talk about something else again. Tags: random_shit, words_i_detest, wurds
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24 October, 5:15 PM Hawai‘i-Aleutian Standard Time:Surprisingly, the ass-kickingest guava nectar I drank in Hawai‘i was the Meadow Gold brand. It contains fully 20% guava juice, while Hawaiian Sun and Aloha both run about 12%. The drawback is that you have to buy it in cardboard cartons, like milk, but that’s a problem only if you have to drink it straight from the carton (like I’m doing right now in the hotel lobby). The plan was to have a huge meal and a big-ass Coke with crushed ice a couple hours before I boarded the airport shuttle, and then not to eat or drink anything for the next 15 hours. The first part went well, but I overdid it with the salt, and now I’m gasping. Hence the quart of guava nectar I’m currently guzzling. I still have more than three hours before takeoff to balance the sodium books. I have having to get up every hour to use that horrible, cramped, smelly airplane bathroom. Forgot to tip the carton of guava nectar to mix it up before I opened it. Consequently, the last third is nearly pure, undiluted guava purée. Yum. It takes me back to our hike from the Seven Sacred Pools of Kipahulu on the Hana side of Maui, when we walked through a wild guava grove. Guava is not native to Hawai‘i—all the more the pity. For some reason I think of them as the Seven Sacred Pools of Fred. I don’t know why. Wait—yes, I do. In high school band class, when it was too close to Christmas to expect anyone to behave, our band director showed us The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. The brother and his friends called it The Seventh Voyage of Fred, for reasons they weren’t inclined to share with the rest of us, if they even knew what they were. Thought I would work for a couple hours before leaving for the airport, in the hotel “business center”—a cubbyhole next to the gift shop with a few desks and computers. Since none of the computers work, I assumed I’d find some privacy. For the first five minutes I was right; but then about two thousand Japanese high school students congregated just outside and held a shouting contest. Some things, like laughter, are the same in any culture. Add raucous teenage conversation to the list. I’m probably getting sick. Not that I feel like I’m getting sick; I’m speaking from a purely statistical viewpoint. Chances are, one of the myriad viruses bombarding my respiratory tract over the last seven days got through. Can only hope it is satisfied to incubate asymptomatically until I at least get home. Don’t want to stage an encore of my colleague’s performance on the way out here. 25 October, 9:30 AM Central Daylight Time (11 hours later):Oh fuck. Fuck-fuck-fuckity-fuck. Seven hours into our seven-and-a-half-hour flight from Honolulu to Houston, we’ve entered a holding pattern south of Midland/Odessa on account of thunderstorms at our destination. The display at the front of the cabin shows that we’re drawing a big oval racetrack, about a hundred miles (160 km) per lap, across the oil fields of West Texas. At our altitude there’s a 60-MPH (100-km/h) gale from the southwest, which has tilted our racetrack just a little clockwise from horizontal. Our pattern is holding steady with respect to the ground, which means that our contrail must look like an enormous, sky-spanning Slinky drifting to the northeast. Too bad nobody on the ground can see it; nothing visible below us right now but a big plain of cloud. Okay, we’ve finally broken the holding pattern, and the first officer has assured us that we’re headed to Houston. No chance I’ll make my connection. Can only hope that my next flight is as delayed as this one. First time I saw it, I though the animated map of our flight’s progress was the coolest thing in the world. Now I’m not so sure. Now we’re drawing big bends and loops and waves all over Texas, and we settle into our assigned place in line for landing. Can’t imagine how many other planes are out here, making racetracks of their own. I think we have first priority. Don’t care to hear how much of a fuel reserve we have after eight and a half hours in the air. Heh. We just drew a big ampersand north of Austin. 50 October, 5:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time (18 1/2 hours later):Down in Cleveland, only three hours late. Should consider myself lucky, though I’ve been awake for 28 hours and have two more to go before I can hit the hay. All in all I feel nowhere near as horrible as I’d expected. Yay me, world traveler. Tags: meeting
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The rental prices for this vendor booth are ludicrous. US $14 for a waste basket? $54 for a grey chair with what appear to be semen stains? (A chair with arms, and presumably no semen stains, is an extra $33.50.) $45 for vacuuming a 90-sq.-ft. (8.4-m 2) booth one time? The only reasonably priced item on the list is the warehouse storage for our stuff, and that’s only a quarter of the total cost. I spent about a half an hour attempting to connect to the crappy-ass “free WiFi” at the convention hall. During the five minutes my laptop claimed I was on, my successful Net traffic totaled about 300 bytes. Worse yet, the convention WiFi poisoned my computer so that I then couldn’t connect back at the hotel, which had been working fine. What the hell? Hawai‘i is not the third world; we should have mastered the technology here by now. At least I wasn’t charged for this exercise in frustration. A 7-Eleven is located literally across the street from the convention center. Life-saving, it has been. Our $14 wastebasket (apparently there is an extra charge for emptying it, which we didn’t pay) is half full of discarded 40-oz. (1.2-ℓ) Slurpee cups. Pretty soon I’ll have to start stacking the cups together so they’ll fit. My boss said he’d attend the vendor booth for most of the six hours on each of the days the exhibits were open. Actually did about an hour and a half on each of the first two days. Sigh. I actually abandoned the booth during the research poster sessions, after putting out extra candy. Reckoned that people could grab the candy as they walked by just as easily if I weren’t there. Note to self: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are far more highly prized as treats than Tootsie Roll Pops; and they don’t melt in the Hawaiian climate as we’d feared. Had drinks and dinner with my colleagues from Seattle. Was delighted to hear them cuss. It blows my mind how conservative my current department is, given that it’s full of scientists with advanced degrees in a field that depends crucially on modern theories of human evolution. Even the known liberals among my coworkers seldom use expletives, no matter what the provocation. A pity. Forgetting we were having a reunion dinner at a Thai restaurant last night, I had Thai curry for lunch. As it happened, it didn’t matter, as I promptly dumped my entire lunch in my lap. I didn’t even get to taste it. My Hawaiian shirt somehow survived unscathed. Not so, my formerly white socks and sneakers. Even after I washed up in the nearest rest room, I looked like I had some bizarre kidney disease. (Yes, Terri-ちゃん, I did think of the “curry panda” escapade in Panda Ko-panda.) Every speaker in this session could moonlight as an auctioneer. Even the non-native English speakers. I scratched my head and inadvertently bought an antique mahogany table for $58,000. The meeting program guide warned us to wear fairly warm clothing because the meeting rooms were air-conditioned. Glad I ignored that advice. The whole complex is open to the outside; the rooms are cooler, but cooler is, of course, a relative term. Going to the talks means only that I can stop sweating for a little while. On the other hand, the air conditioning in my hotel room is really good. Even at the lowest setting I have to bundle up like a raccoon in its raccocoon. I’d wondered why the beds had four sheets and a comforter in this climate. Now I know. One definite improvement in this year's meeting compared to two years ago: they're really enforcing the " no flash photography in the meeting rooms" rule. Only saw one flash go off during a talk. A couple of bouncers converged on the source, and just for good measure the photographer got chewed out over the PA system by a moderator. In 2007 some of the lectures looked more like a press conference—or an artillery barrage. Last day and I’m really burned out. Will go to one more lecture, but only because it’s a former coworker talking about a subject I'm interested in. Tags: meeting
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(All times Hawai‘i-Aleutian Standard) 06:15 Awakened. Ah, yes: 11 h sleep can cure almost anything that isn’t growing in you. 06:45 Checked e-mail. Letter from colleague, now safely home, with instructions on how to set up vendor booth. He still doesn’t know what hit him: is still assuming an abrupt onset of the ’flu, but doesn’t have a fever now. Instructions are unnecessarily complicated. 07:30 Out in search of breakfast. Receptionist says there’s a grocery store in the adjoining mall, just past the Macy’s. Found the grocery store just past Macy’s, separated by one floor and about a half mile of shops. Ala Moana is the largest outdoor mall I’ve ever seen. And all the little fountain pools are also koi ponds. How cool is that? Continental breakfast is $11 at the hotel, but I can prorate these bagels and cream cheese to about $1.50 per day. Starting tomorrow, that is; for today, it’s two huge-ass chocolate raised donuts, as fresh and fluffy as a cloud. 08:30 Played around on the ’Net; found a Kinko’s (now FedEx™ Business Solutions To Maximize Personal Productivity and a Whole Shitload of Other Meaningless Corporate Jargon Center) only a block away. Am ahead of schedule. 09:00 Made copies of flyers and shit for the vendor booth. Printed out all the shipping receipts colleague had brought as far as Houston and took back home. The six-hour time difference is working to my advantage, as my home support team has until early afternoon to find something I need first thing in the morning. 09:20 Off to the convention center. Had a difficult time convincing the exhibiton registrar that I was now officially in charge of the booth. Received red-bordered name tag and the awesome power it entails. Vendors get their own special lounge, perpetually stocked with muffins and sweet rolls. Must remind self to sign up as a vendor next year, even if I don’t staff the booth. 09:45 Began unpacking the materials for the booth, and discovered that colleague’s instructions weren’t needlessly complicated after all. After a careful inventory, decided to go back to hotel, review e-mailed instructions, and continue on to an OfficeMax or the equivalent and obtain a tool for breaching the quarter-inch-thick layer of strapping tape in which all the boxes and crates were entombed, and a few kilometers of strapping tape. 10:25 Nearest OfficeMax 1.4 miles (2.2 km) away. Temperature already in the low 80s °F (upper 20s °C) and rising, humidity 99.5% and holding. Answered a few more e-mails and slathered SPF 30 on the bald spot. Also bought a couple of Hawaiian shirts and a boss straw hat. Figured it’s time to act my (rather advanced) age. 11:35 After 25 min fast march, arrived at OfficeMax. New Hawaiian shirt uniformly damp but not dripping. Strangely, in Honolulu only the side streets have street signs. It’s assumed that everyone knows the names of all the major thoroughfares. Good thing I have excellent visual-spatial memory. 12:05 Stopped at the mall food court on the way back. Thai chicken curry yum yum, Coke with crushed ice yum yum yum yum yum. Dehydration may be my greatest foe. Discovered how to identify the overpriced stores at the mall by the quantity of air conditioning. The chillier the blast of wind issuing from the entrance, the pricier the goods. Sneaky. Almost worked on me. Would have worked, but I hate clothes shopping with a passion (Hawaiian clothing excepted). 12:50 Now properly armed, tackled the setup for the vendor booth. Main problem was the curved backdrop on which we hang our big poster . Wire frame is as complicated as a spider web, and just about as flimsy. It somehow unfolds in all three dimensions at once, and probably in others, as well. Five vertical metal bars with joints like spider’s legs, listed as “optional,” aren’t. Sheets of black carpet attach to the metal bars by magnets, and are aligned by use of minuscule pegs that can’t compete with the magnets, so impossible to fit everything together perfectly. After much trial and error, achieved an imperfect but acceptable result; okay as long a nobody shines a light behind the display and reveals the gaps. Eight-foot by six-foot (240 × 180 cm) advertising poster attaches to carpet by “male” Velcro, which for adhesion far outperforms the magnets. Had to realign the carpet with the poster attached. If the carpet by itself was impossible to get straight, this was impossible squared. Did I mention that the carpet far outweighed the aluminum frame, so the entire thing was just about to fall over on me the whole time? To review: Velcro >> magnets >> minuscule pegs. Entire thing now held together by gravity and weak strip magnets. An earthquake of magnitude 0.2 will bring it to the ground. Hope that O‘ahu not as geologically active as it was a million years ago. 14:20 Still haven’t unpacked the monitor, but no loss since I don’t know what it’s for. Called it quits. Time for another guava nectar. 16:15 It’s raining about two hundred yards offshore. If the sun will only peep out for a second we’d have a killer rainbow. Tags: meeting
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Well, this meeting has turned out far more exciting than I’d expected. And a lot less fun. The first half-hour of our first leg of the flight out went okay, insofar as having to get up at 6:00 AM is ever “okay.” But I’d just started to drift off to sleep, when I heard a loud, “Are you feeling all right?” I thought I was being addressed, as I was hunched over the tray attached to the seat in front of me. (That’s the only way I can sleep on airplanes, and it only works if the seat ahead is fully upright. There are disadvantages to being tall.) But in fact it was my colleague, whom I'll call Ken (not his real name), sitting two seats away on my row. He was leaning forward, pale as ash, his head resting against the seat in front of him. Rivers of sweat were running down his face. I’d heard the term “breaking out in a cold sweat,” and have done so myself, but this was in another league entirely: he was almost projectile sweating. A rain of perspiration droplets pattered audibly onto the carpet. ( More... )Tags: meeting, sliver_moon
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For the record: I have not abandoned this LiveJournal. Several non-work-related projects have occupied all my free time over the last six weeks or so, and for the next two weeks work-related projects will do the same. Sad, that; I'm itching to write another travelogue. But for just a moment, I would like to show you something that occurred to me while I was shaving this afternoon. For some reason, every company that makes shaving cream simultaneously discontinued the lemon-lime scent, and in desperation I tried Edge Gel, in the hopes that something totally alien would perhaps be a little less disappointing than my treasured thick foam in a horrible second-rate scent. My container of deep turquoise gel (which doesn't smell too bad, all things considered) bears this product logo:  Amusingly, when we flip that baby over, the brand name—though it now forms a completely different word—can still be read:  Abpa Gel may never replace good ol' Gillette Foamy, but I think I can get to where I can stand it. Come to think of it, that font isn't so far off from the Mao Uietunow (Mountain Dew) font. Recently, the label on my second-favorite soft drink was shorted to "Mtn Dew." I guess that reading the entire word Mountain must severely tax the attention span of your average radical teenager. I don't particularly care for this slick-modern-corporate-but-nonetheless-s lightly-edgy style of logo, but it's still a vast improvement over the Xtreme Ugly fad of the 90s, whose stench lingers on even to this day. Tags: wurds
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Occasionally I am stricken with a hunger that only a gyros sandwich can cure. Once, not too long ago, it hit me while we were on our way to another restaurant. This was our conversation in the car: "No, wait—we have to go to that gyros place just past the freeway!" "Sure?" "Oh, yes—but if they don't have the rotating cylinder of meat, the deal's off." "Rotating meat? In Cleveland?" "Sure, why not?" "You won't find anything that authentic in this town." "A man can dream, can't he?" "Bet you they won't have it." "Five bucks?" "Okay." "Okay." In Kathy's defense, we've eaten at several purportedly Greek restaurants around here, and every one served gyros with paper-thin, rounded rectangles of meat, all identical in size and shape as if cut with a laser. Obviously they'd been yanked from a freezer and slapped on the grill a few seconds—just long enough to absorb whatever carcinogens were at that point just about to bake into the metal. Yet the hole-in-the-wall joint we'd noted on an earlier foraging mission had that informal, sincere look of an establishment that would never sacrifice authenticity for convenience. My hopes soared as we entered and caught the jangly sounds of a bouzouki issuing from a low-fi speaker. The speaker, resting uncomfortably atop a soft-drink cooler, was glazed with condensed grease. Now here, I thought, was a genuine Greek fast-food eatery, where just breathing the air a few minutes exceeds the legal limit for daily saturated fat intake. Even better, a lighted sign above the counter hawked "Fresh-cut Fries," complete with a faded picture of mouth-watering, eight-inch potato spears, delectably square in cross-section and glistening with secret oils from the Mediterranean. And they had the rotating cylinder of meat. Wordlessly, Kathy handed me a five-dollar bill. A medical lab tech, fresh off her shift at the Cleveland Clinic, came in while we were waiting. Her name badge bore an almost unpronounceably Greek name. I cocked an ear, for I expected to hear an authentic Greek pronunciation of " gyros." (The proprietor was a tight-lipped fellow who spoke in shrugs and subsonic grunts, so no help there.) (One of my greatest linguistic pet peeves is pronouncing the Greek word gyros like the English word gyros—"jye-rows." You can even compound the horror by leaving off the final s, which belongs there in the singular. Yeah, yeah, I know—it's an accepted English pronunciation, but so is "Kerry-Okie," and that one pissed me off even before I learned anything about Japanese diction. Now, saying "yee-ros" gets you in the ballpark, but I won't settle for an English cop-out if I can hear and reasonably approximate the real deal.) I assumed an attitude of listening readiness. Our Greek customer spoke. "Can I have a deluxe jye-rows?" AAAAARGH!
I was horribly disappointed, but you need not be: you can hear, on Wikipedia, the word gyros pronounced in Greek. Please note: Wikipedia has sensibly encoded sounds as ".ogg" files, which practically no computer on Earth has been play without special software since Ogg the caveman hacked the first PC out of flint; although Firefox 3.5 will somehow play them if you first go to the file page, as linked here. The initial sound is a voiced palatal fricative, a phoneme that (as far as I know) doesn't occur in English. (Think of a breathy "y" with a just a hint of "zh".) I have heard it, however, in the Mexican Spanish pronunciation of yo ("I"). Actually, the y of yo varies quite a bit between Mexican Spanish and Central American Spanish. In junior high school we had a student teacher from Ecuador who said " yo" with a perfect English "j" sound at the beginning. She'd get all mad at us, too, when we answered her example of " Yo digo la verdad" with "Joe digo la verdad." And since we were all beginners, we felt really stupid. How hard could it be to say " yo"? Perhaps they say "jye-row" in Ecuador, as well. Tags: wurds
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Here's a tongue twister for you. Say the following ten times quickly: Cinnamon synonym.A quick Google search shows that I'm not the first to make have discovered it. I keep thinking I'm edging closer to an original thought, only to be struck down time and time again by the cold, unfeeling, all-seeing eye of Google.
If you want to see a large room full of teenagers sit in absolute silence for two and a half hours, just go see the latest Harry Potter film a couple days after it's first released. That was the most polite movie crowd I've seen—perhaps ever—in a public theater, and Kathy and I were by 20 years the oldest people there.
Like everyone else in North America, I missed the spectacular total eclipse Wednesday, but a couple weeks back I saw something almost as unusual: a funny Get Fuzzy strip. And not only was it funny—it was quite clever and sophisticated, too. Here it is:  Impressive—the punchline is far more effective if spoken in classical Latin! And the dog is supposed to be the amiably clueless member of the family. As a long-time cat owner, I can appreciate the scentiment. Okay, I'm being a bit harsh with Get Fuzzy. I don't often find it amusing, but it still falls into the better half of all widely syndicated comics. For originality it still beats all to hell the heavily commercialized "favorites"— Garfield, Cathy, The Family Circus and their ilk (the older Peanuts excepted).
Here's a riddle that only an old Dungeons and Dragons player will understand. (And it only took me a quarter century to think of it). How can you add one letter to a Gummi Bear to obtain a classic D&D monster from the very first version of the game? Note: What you add the letter to is not the actual words Gummi Bear, but a two-word synonym. I'll be amazed if anyone gets this. The answer is at bottom, behind the cut.
And now, yet another gem from the Treasury of Things We Say in Certain Situations: Kathy and I recently took an initiative to get more vegetables in our diet. We've been keeping a supply of cucumber salad handy—just sliced cucumbers and onions soaked in approximately half-strength vinegar with a dash of Good Seasons Italian Dressing mix, and refrigerated. Whenever it's time to start a new batch, we recount a famous conversation in Love Is Hell, between the hero, Binky the Rabbit, and his girlfriend, Sheba, under the heading "Do not make jocular marriage proposals if you don't want to get clobbered": Binky: "Will you mar—" Sheba: "Oh, yes!" Binky: "—inate this steak for me?" We've been saying this for at least a dozen years—"Will you mar—" "Yes!" "—inate this steak for me?"—anytime we need to soak any kind of food in any kind of sauce, marinade or other liquid medium. The strange thing is that Kathy has never seen the original comic, and yet she recites it as avidly as I do. That's what's great about Things We Say in Certain Situations: the essence of the quote, completely detached from its original context, is self-sustaining. ( Answer to the riddle… )Tags: random_shit, wurds
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One unfortunate consequence of all this lovely cool weather we've been having is that the stargazing has been even crappier than usual. It's getting to the point that the early-morning sliver moons are just about the only ones I see anymore. Last Monday's one-and-a-half-day sliver moon was a case in point. I almost set my alarm for 5:15, knowing that in the unlikely event that the Nightly Rainstorm broke up early enough, I'd have a chance to see the sliver moon, Venus and Mars all in one patch of sky. And that I did. The sliver moon, bathed in dawn's early light, had just barely popped over the horizon. The bright star Aldebaran, actually brighter than Mars was, added a second red pinpoint to the tableau.
Later that morning there appeared in our paper a rare sliver-moon-related comic:  A careful look at the Moon here reveals a surprising fact about the Born Loser, assuming it's shortly after sunset, and that he and Wilberforce haven't been up all night watching Dennis Hopper movies: he lives in the Southern Hemisphere! If he lived in the temperate latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, the "horns" of the waxing crescent would point up and to the left, and not to the right. I find this but of speculation far more intriguing than anything I have ever read in the comic that was actually intended by the artist (unless he drew the Moon backwards intentionally, as a test of our sliver-moon-watching skills, in which case I'm really impressed). Tags: sliver_moon
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I owe ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cutiepi314 thanks for suggesting that I update the Idiotic Table of the Conservatives. The original dates back to a few months after the 2004 presidential election, and with all the fresh, new crazies that have slithered into prominence since then, it really needed a good overhaul.  Click here for smallish but readable version, 1024 × 870Click here for humongous version, 3072 × 2611(see below for key) As before, I aimed for a decent mix of neocons, religious nuts, pundits, flat-taxers, corporate stooges, bigots, rabid pro-lifers (mostly the same group as the religious nuts) and outrageous hypocrites. A staunch defender of science, I packed the table fairly heavily with creationists, "Intelligent Design" advocates (i.e., creationists), and any person or group active in climate change denial. I took a slightly different approach for the new version. Initially, I preserved all the chemical symbols from the Periodic Table and chose names to fit. In a few cases, the connections were rather tenuous: the letters of the chemical symbol appeared somewhere in the name, but didn't even come close to evoking that name. I've now moved to a more flexible approach, requiring a much clearer correspondence between symbols and names—usually as the initials or as the first two letters of the first or last name—but changed the symbols where necessary (albeit by as little as possible). One clever exception, for which I thank samwibatt, was assigning the symbol Au to Bernie Goldberg. Nonetheless, I wanted to adhere to the Periodic Table closely enough that nobody but a chemist would notice the difference at first glance. Thus, in the most familiar portions of the Table—the first two rows, the first two columns and the noble gases—I kept all the actual symbols, with one exception. The largest changes were to the rare earth metals (the bottom two rows of fourteen) and the most newly discovered named elements, 104-112 (element 112 is new to Version 2.0, and as yet has only a provisional name). This time, I expanded the list to include several organizations, such as the American Family Association, where the names fit well and were far more recognizable than their leaders' names. And one corporation: the conversion of Xenon to Exxon was far too natural to resist, though ExxonMobil is only an indirect player in the lovely sewage explosion that is right-wing American politics (via a number of libertarian and conservative think tanks). I counted Libertarians in with conservatives, since the former have been more than happy to cooperate with the Bushies' agenda to obliterate any restrictions on corporate greed. Of course, the list is rather topical. I'll need to do another complete overhaul in honor of the 2012 election, at the latest, after a new generation of laughable fools takes center stage. Also, I must apologize for my Americentrism. My knowledge of foreign government and politics is just about nil. I embrace even American politics, in which I have much more of a vested interest, only with the same reluctance with which I would embrace a tornado full of barbed wire. In fact, there was a time when I would have refused to admit I knew even this much about contemporary politics. Because of the restrictions I'd placed on names, not to mention my own lack of imagination, I'd padded Version 1 of the Idiotic Table with some fifteen neocons whose names meant nothing to me. I've kept two or three, just because when I read up on what they've been doing in the last four years, I gained an entirely new appreciation for just how evil the Bush administration was. The Project for the New American Century was pretty much running the country for about six years. Take, for example, Paula Dobriansky. Four years ago I had her pegged primarily as a PNAC member, but since then her bio has accrued a rather humorous footnote. Part of her job in the State Department was to attend international conferences on climate change and obstruct any progress in reaching agreements to reduce CO 2 emissions. At the Bali summit on climate change in 2007, when she attempted to pull her usual tricks, she was booed off the stage by the delegates from developing nations. (I wonder whether these delegates sensed vulnerability in the Bush administration after the disastrous 2006 election, and decided they weren't going to take the hypocritical bullshit anymore.) If you don't recognize a name, a quick trip to Wikipedia may uncover some disturbing facts about who's been in charge. (Michelle Malkin is a graduate of Oberlin?!? Oh, my aching alma mater.) Anyway, if you have any suggestions for individuals, companies or organizations that are deserving to be included in such disreputable company, I welcome them. Below (behind the cut) is a key with symbol, element (in parentheses if I changed the symbol), name and significance for each entry. ( Click here for key )Tags: evolution, fundies, general_science, politics
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On Wednesday evening, having stopped on my way home for my かわいい colleague Laura's post-defense victory dinner, I arrived home in the (relatively) cool calm that settles in shortly after sunset. As I rolled into the driveway on my bicycle, I reflexively scanned the dimming western sky for the elusive 29-hour sliver moon I knew was out there somewhere. I didn't expect to find it, of course: the evening was clear, but not crystal clear. By pure providence I found the unbelievably slivery moon grazing the horizon, nestled in a notch between the silhouettes of two distant trees. So slender was this moon slice that only the middle third or so was visible against the twilight, like an elbow macaroni made of angel hair, bisected by a thread of brownish-grey stratus cloud. It was only the second time I've spied a true one-day sliver moon, and in fact may have been the sliveriest moon I've ever seen. Wish I could have taken a picture of it; but considering that it had at most two more minutes of visibility before it slid beneath the skyline, I knew I didn't have time to run in, find the camera, and adjust it for sliver-moon photography. Sigh. Alas, there isn't much of interest in the sky over the next several weeks. Technically, most of North America will get a lunar eclipse early the morning of July 7, the Moon will barely graze the Earth's penumbra, so we won't even notice it even if we're looking for it. On the other hand, China will experience a doozy of a solar eclipse on July 22 (July 21 in the Americas). As the Moon will be just past perigee, the area of totality will be unusually large, and duration unusually long. Several major cities, including Shanghai, will enjoy an astonishing five minutes of totality. A spot in the West Pacific will experience almost seven minutes of totality, as the Moon's shadow approaches the Marshall Islands. I suppose it's a bit late to book a flight to Shanghai. Tags: astronomy, sliver_moon
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Here's an example from our childhood that shows how awesome it could be to know that Dad had our backs. In actuality, it's the brother's story, but it's too good not to tell. In his early childhood it wasn't clear whether the brother was right- or left-handed. He did most of the fine-motor things, like drawing and writing, with his right, but ate with his left. When he started kindergarten, his teacher noticed this and called Dad in for a meeting. "I'm sorry to tell you this, but your son will never learn to read," she told Dad. He responded by taking a book from the nearest shelf, opening it at random, and asking the brother to start reading out loud—because of course the bro already knew how to read, and in fact had been reading for a couple of years. The teacher was struck speechless. As they left, Dad couldn't resist a soft poke: "You'll pardon me if I don't seem too concerned."
I've got another one. Fast forward to high school. Our school, like all Utah high schools, required the seniors to take a class called "Responsible Parenting." (Given the number of my classmates who already had the opportunity to apply the lessons in a practical setting, we would have been far better served taking a class called "Responsible Intercourse" our junior year, but naturally the Utah school system would have none of that.) The brother, correctly identifying the class as a steaming crock of nonsense, signed up for something worthwhile instead—AP Music, I believe. Again, Dad was summoned to school, and this time was informed that if he didn't take Responsible Parenting, the brother would not receive his diploma the following May. Dad exploded. "You graduate students who can't read, and you won't let my son graduate because he didn't take egg-carrying?!" After much reflection, our principal decided to allow the brother to graduate sans egg-carrying. Tags: dad
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A good friend of mine from second grade found me on Facebook. We were best friends for only a short while; by fourth grade we'd drifted apart. Not from any bad feelings—we just made other connections, and eventually had new best friends. We stayed on good, if not close terms, all the way through high school, and had a nice conversation at our five-year reunion. Remembering his clever sense of humor, I was happy to get back in touch. Through him I linked up with about half a dozen other high school acquaintances. They were all Facebook friends with each other, too: a happy network of aging classmates nearing their 25-year reunion. Looking at their profiles, it all came back to me at once how radically different I've grown since I left Utah. To my treasured collection of lefties I'd appended a staunch Republican contingent. My friend from second grade listed his political leanings as "Millenial [ sic] Theocrat." I figured he was joking. He wasn't. Still, these were people I used to get along with just fine, and I found we could still get along just fine—until I added a particular former band classmate whom I had a massive crush on in seventh grade. Suddenly my updates page was full of right-wing bullshit even more brainless and paranoid than I thought possible. Obama, the crypto-Marxist. Sarah Palin, victim of a left-wing media crusade. And loads and loads of "tea-party" nonsense (seriously, how many of those doofi protesting "socialist tax raises" had family incomes over $250K?). Now I don't mind seeing different opinions on current issues—in fact, I welcome it, as it broadens the mind and challenges me to find convincing counterarguments. But there's a difference between contrary opinions that make you question your own, and unmitigated lunacy. I dropped her promptly, and my Facebook page quickly shed its burden of insanity.* But I knew that if I kept adding childhood acquaintances willy-nilly, I'd run into the same problem again sooner or later. So I developed a Wingnut Litmus Test: a simple criterion that I could use, when an ex-classmate sent me a friend request, to determine whether or not I should avoid, avoid, avoid with just a quick glance at the person's profile. Version 1.0 of the WLT has worked perfectly (albeit with n only equal to 4) with only a single standard: is the potential friend a fan of Sarah Palin? Yes ⇒ wingnut; No ⇒ not a wingnut. Easy as pie.
My students presented their term projects on the last week of class. On Tuesday, I brought doughnuts (from a place called "Amy Joy"—the best I've found in town), and on Thursday I brought bagels. I wanted the greatest possible variety, but I had to forsake the roasted-garlic bagel because I couldn't find the special lead-lined cask to store it in. And I sure wasn't going to contaminate all the other bagels with essence of garlic. It then occurred to me that the act of choosing and packaging an assortment of bagels is an excellent test of the ability to look ahead and consider the results of one's actions. (Perhaps it's also an exercise in consideration for others.) The brother has a saying along these lines: "Any bagel in the same bag as an garlic bagel, is a garlic bagel." You could consider it a corollary of one of my favorite proverbs ever: "Add a tablespoon of wine to a barrel full of sewage and you get sewage. Add a tablespoon of sewage to a barrel full of wine and you get—sewage." As a matter of fact, I love onion and garlic bagels. But when it comes to mixing these kinds with the sweet varieties, like raisin or blueberry, I'm a strict segregationist. Now, if I sleep in too late, I sometimes skip breakfast at home and score a bagel instead from the cafeteria when I get done with whatever meeting I almost sleep through. Problem is, after the main breakfast hour, whoever maintains the "bake-it-yourself" station jams all the leftover bagels together in one of the glass jars that normally holds a single flavor. For sheer dismay, nothing beats tearing ravenously into the luscious cinnamon-raisin bagel I'd been dreaming about for the last hour, sitting half-starved through an interminable meeting, and biting through an intact garlic clove sloughed off an onion-and-garlic bagel rammed into it by some unthinking slob.
( One more... )Tags: general_science, random_shit
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Sighting sliver moons early in the morning is becoming a habit—secondary to the habit of being stomped on by bored cats at five in the morning. A week ago Friday, on my way back to bed after the usual morning feline banishment, I spied a brilliant planet to the southeast, set in a crystal-clear predawn glow. I looked around, knowing that a two-day waning sliver moon was lurking somewhere near, but could only see a pinpoint of white light peering through the crown of the gigantic maple that takes a large scoop out of our eastern skyline. I was still pondering whether I could count that as an official sighting when, fifteen minutes later, the real sliver moon popped over the horizon, well to the north of east. My brilliant pinpoint was actually Venus, and the planet I thought was Venus was actually Jupiter. Apart from an occasional raging thunderstorm, the weather here has been postcard perfect over the last couple of weeks. I had high hopes of viewing both the one- and two-day waxing sliver moons on Monday and Tuesday evenings, and if I did, I could claim my first ever Sliver Moon Trifecta—sightings of the Moon on three different days within the six days centered on the new Moon. (To qualify as a sliver moon, the Moon must be within 72 hours of new.) Monday was indeed lovely all day, and around 9:00 PM I observed a sharp-edged 36-hour sliver moon. Very slivery indeed—perhaps the sliveriest I've seen since we moved here three and a half years ago. Tuesday's 2 1/2-day sliver moon should have been easy as pie—Moon pie, that is—to catch sight of, since it didn't officially set until about 11:30 PM, nearly three hours after sunset. However, I failed to reckon with the perverse nature of Midwest thunderstorms. Mother Nature decided to cash in about two months' worth of storm cells Tuesday afternoon and evening. (Luckily there was a respite of about an hour around 5:00 PM during which I rode home from work in record time, assuming I was about to get drenched at any minute.) I periodically peeked outside every half hour or so after sunset, but only a sky full of roiling clouds (and a face full of rain) greeted my view. Finally, around 10:30 PM, I noticed a pearly glow outlining a rift of low cumulus. Alas, I can't claim a sliver-moon sighting unless I can actually make out the shape of the crescent Moon. So close, and yet so far. Why must you taunt me like this, sliver moon?
In other astronomy news: the date to remember next month is June 19. Specifically, about an hour before dawn on the 19th. Anyone who is up at that ghastly hour, and who has a clear sky low in the east, will enjoy a near triple conjunction of Mars, Venus and a three-day crescent Moon. Mars, by far the dimmest of the trio at magnitude 1.1, will lie just above and to the left of Venus. The actual conjunction between the two planets won't occur until 9:10 AM EST on the 20th, at which time they'll be separated by 2° of arc (four times the width of the full Moon). Observers on the Pacific coast, down south, may be able to view Mars and Venus at the moment of conjunction. Sorry, Seattlites, the Sun will be well up by conjunction time (6:10 AM PST). I vividly remember the Seattle sky getting noticeably bright by 4:00 AM in June. Tags: astronomy, sliver_moon
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Finally. A whole evening without two or three projects that have to get done immediately.The last month has been no fun at all. Since mid-April—make that six weeks—I've been interested in little outside work but to stockpile sleep. I get home in the evening, scarf some dinner, and either fall asleep immediately, or work six more hours. I'm still recovering from the night of April 30, when I had to compile and make intelligible a large set of ragtag presentations for an all-day meeting justifying ourselves to the NIH; to conduct an analysis on data I'd received scant hours previously for a talk by a collaborator set for the following noon; and to revise a full set of figures for a publication going in the following afternoon. And the moment I was done with the meeting on Friday, it was time to grade my final exam and all the student term projects. Only after that could I start working down the list of the twenty or so research projects I had backed up, that my colleagues have been hounding me about for ages. The worst has been over for a couple of weeks now, but only now have I felt any motivation to write just for enjoyment. Hope I remember how....
For some disgusting, educational fun, try the game of SNEEZE! Infect an entire building full of people with a single, well-timed sneeze. Just the thing to commemorate the swine-flu scare of 2009. You only get one sneeze in each round, so timing is essential. Your hapless victims include children, adults and the elderly, and the optimal strategy for dispersal takes advantage of all three. Children can carry the virus halfway across the playfield before sneezing, but on account of their underdeveloped lungs, they rarely infect more than two new people. Old geezers hardly move at all, and sneeze the moment they're infected. Because of their cavernous nostrils, however, old geezers cover a truly astounding area with their snot bombs, dispersing the viruses over nearly a 180° angle. Intermediate in both range of motion and sneeze volume are the adults. Naturally, infecting the elderly nets you more points than children. (After all, the flu hits them much harder than anyone else.) Nonetheless, your overall goal is to infect as many people as possible, and only by passing a certain percentage can you advance to the next level. Just as in nuclear energy, the key to successful sneezing is to start a chain reaction, so that with each generation of infection, each sneezer recruits, on average, more than one new person. As satisfying as it sounds, sneezing point-blank into someone's face is poor strategy, as the unfortunate victim completely blocks the spray, thus moderating the chain reaction. The early rounds seem trivial, until some stupid kid darts in front of you just as you let fly, and immediately trots over to the nearest corner to emit a dunce sneeze. The last two rounds, with their high infection requirements and sprawling playfields, require you to think at least two generations ahead—not an easy task given several dozen aimlessly milling victims. I've only made it to Round 10 twice, and neither time did I get anywhere near the required 80% infection rate. Intriguingly, the Wellcome Trust helped to fund SNEEZE. I'm impressed with both the game play—not exactly realistic, but still fun and challenging—and the graphics. Whoever did the artwork really knows their mucus.
It has taken me upwards of four decades to fully appreciate just how amazingly good mocha almond fudge ice cream is. It has everything: heterogeneity (so every bite is different), fudge in quantities that make it a constituent rather than a seasoning, and a scrumptious background flavor that constitutes an excellent ice-cream flavor all by itself. Few things in life are as satisfying as taking out a scoop of mocha almond fudge and exposing a gigantic vein of pure fudge. You know what you have to do next, don't you? Right: you have to mine that baby out. Quarry out that fudge vein right to the bottom of the carton. You'll piss off your spouse in the meantime. Not your problem—she's just jealous because she didn't find it first. There's one problem with mocha almond fudge, though. For some reason the flavor disappears after just a few bites. My sense of taste doesn't habituate so quickly with any other kind of ice cream, except maybe a few of the louder colors of sherbet. I believe I've found the culprit, though. It's the burnt almonds. I love their low-key, nutty flavor; but they tend to get stuck in my teeth, and then overload my taste buds with wide-angle flavor rays. Consequently, I now eat only an ounce or so of mocha almond fudge at a sitting, and I save the almonds until the very end for maximum enjoyment. Tags: random_shit
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For the second month in a row, sleeping light paid off for viewing sliver moons. I woke up, quite involuntarily, at first light Thursday morning. Before I drifted back to sleep, I peered out the window above my bedside table, thinking I might get lucky, and I did: a 36-hour sliver moon was floating atop the tattered remnants of our nightly rainstorm, deep in the predawn glow. A little ways above and to the south, a thin crescent Venus blazed away, amazingly bright given how little of its visible disc was illuminated. Higher still, Jupiter—hopelessly outclassed in brilliance but trying all the harder because of it—glowed like a milky pearl, completing a near perfect line of three celestial bodies. Too bad the Sun had long since risen by 9:00 AM EDT on Tuesday. Early birds on the Pacific coast were rewarded for getting up first thing in the morning with a beautiful occultation of Venus by the Moon. Look here for a time-lapse movie (sped up slightly) of Venus’s minuscule but dazzling crescent disappearing behind the Moon’s leading edge. From the same collection, a lovely shot displaying the relative sizes of the sliver moon and sliver Venus, and a short movie showing Venus popping back out from behind the Moon. (From the points of ingress and egress, I estimate that the occultation lasted a bit more than half an hour.) As I mentioned last month, we're in for a treat Sunday evening (weather gods permitting), as a two-day sliver moon will be poised just above Mercury, with the Pleiades intervening. It's quite possible, however, that Mercury will set before the sky darkens enough to allow the Pleiades to shine visibly. Still, we can hope. [ Edit, April 26:] Streaked with thin but very opaque stratus clouds, the western horizon did not allow for viewing of Mercury Sunday evening, let alone the Pleiades—too bad. A bright sliver moon was nonetheless visible. Tags: astronomy, sliver_moon
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This week I learned the answer to a question I hadn't thought to ask, viz.: how rapidly a truly inspiring story can grow tiresome through unrelenting ubiquity. You know of whom I speak. I watched the YouTube video, and crowed, "Suck on that, beautiful people!"—and six days later, I already cringe every time another Facebook friend posts the link under the title "Don't judge a book by its cover...." Seriously, under the standard rules of fairness, at least a month should pass from the initiation of a popular phenomenon before I start to feel like an acquaintance has just forwarded me the Darwin Award urban legend about the idiot who straps a JATO unit to his Impala*, later found embedded in a desert cliff, every time somebody brings up the phenomenon.
I hereby nominate "It is what it is" as the stupidest, most annoying and least necessary statement in the English language. I detest glib fatalism. And tautologies. My mother, before it became obvious that I refused to part with my free will, specialized in both. Her mainstay: "You have to do what you have to do." While "X what X" may not qualify as a snowclone, it definitely shares some characteristics of one—in this case, extreme overuse.
The Fifty Most Brilliant Atheists of All Time. I'd heard of nearly every one of these folks, and was pleasantly surprised that Carlin had made the cut. Where's Isaac Asimov?!?_______________________
*Obviously, the luckless car, whether it actually was or not, should have been named "Vlad."Tags: random_shit, words_i_detest
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The "Talking science" Badge.