Jane was a diplomat’s daughter; she’s moved a whole bunch. Here she is now.

• Spread all your things all over the floor so you can’t move. Stare at them, and realize how completely fucking hopeless your task is.
• Alternate compressible things with incompressible things. Make your books look as much like clothes as possible (I’m not entirely sure what this means, but then, most of my 6 hours of sleep last night was spent dreaming about Joan Rivers getting a new facelift that explodes into horrible horrible purple oysters and bronchial tubes when she sneezes during an appearance on my talk show).
• Do the small stuff last.
• Rinse, lather, repeat.

Oh, yes, she refuses to take the blame for my many alterations of her original advice. But I still blame her for the bit about Joan Rivers; her and her wacky chickpea substance. Zoinks.

The Fucking Obvious Fact of the Day is this: doing physics all day makes me cross and ranty. Today’s target is from the New York Times:

But it is in everyday social conversation where the Web is having the greatest impact. Fact-checking’s effect on talking is like a loud thud on the floor, a real conversation stopper, linguists say.
…
“Today’s Parisians and most other Westerners do not need to come together to exchange information, because they get it on the Web or television or a newspaper,” said John L. Locke, a psycholinguist and author of “The De-Voicing of Society,” adding that the information age has made person-to-person news dissemination obsolete.

[link via Tinka, again]

Okay, am I the only one whose parents routinely get up in the middle of dinner to look up the capital of Booglestan in the mildewy 2020 encyclopedia? But that’s not the real issue here; the real issue is that I can’t get my gossip over the Internet. You see, it’s reached the point where I’m more interested in romantic prospects at home than in Denmark. So I think I can accomplish something by guessing at my future love life, but these guesses are all based on fragmentary and outdated information. And this is what post-cyber-ological gossip is all about - glances and subtle implications that are too speculative, and frankly too stupid-sounding, to put down in any permanence, but they keep you informed of the local social hierarchy so you can manipulate it at your convenience. It’s the kind of shit that, when amplified, makes for trashy reality television. And people watch it, eh?

Possibly the feudal Japanese aristocracy played these kinds of games as well. Or possibly not. The caffeine in my tea has finally worn off, I’ve given up studying (I won’t be getting any useful credit from this class anyhow) and I’m going to bed. But I’m still crabby. Boo. Hiss. Growl.

If you, like me, are a last-minute cheapass when it comes to Christmas cards, why not send silly e-mails with links to pictures of nisser and pigs?

Or maybe you have a cosmology exam tomorrow morning that you really ought to be studying for instead. La la la.

I went to the term’s last cosmology lecture out of a lingering sense of duty, and the thought that maybe I’d learn something useful about tomorrow’s final. Instead, I was treated to some meaningless ramble (well, there was no math, anyway) about baby universes and vacuum fluctuations. In the middle, the prof stopped to mention that he probably shouldn’t be using the word “somewhere” to describe events outside of established spacetime. I heartily disagree. Physically of course he’s correct, our naive concept of “space” is completely meaningless when you’re talking about jizz from a physicist’s circle jerk. But more generally speaking, we use metaphors of space for all kinds of not-so-spatial things: relationships, family networks, this here Internet (how many of you care where my server is located?), the set of all polynomial functions, etc. There’s probably a good neurological reason for this, and one could use the ideas of evolutionary psychology to explain why. Of course, one can use the ideas of evolutionary psychology to explain anything.

Regardless, I think it’d be an interesting experiment to run around for a day trying not to use any spatial metaphor, at all. I’m not sure I could do it.

Danish search engines are getting more requests for Christmas than they are for porn [crap summary here]. This has to explain something, but I’m not sure what. Maybe just that the Danes have figured out that certain things don’t need translating… or else those little straw animals all over town have a more sinister story behind them.
[tak, Ralph]

One more indulgence before I go back to things that might be more interesting to those of you without blogs of your own (yes, all three of you):
To me, blogging is all about finding the personal in the general and finding the general in the personal. I think with that, I can sleep well at night knowing that I have a slick answer to all those nasty people who criticize my blogging style and subject matter. Thank you, Tinka.

I’d also like to point out that there aren’t very many nasty people criticizing my blogging style and subject matter. In fact, there are none at all, which makes me sad. I’d like to get some more hate mail, maybe some scathing commentary on my abuse of the English language, or clever suggestions as to why I really write about my bodily fluids. Even lewd remarks from all you people who come here looking for naked boys in white socks, and are pissed off because you can’t find any, would be all right. But this impersonal “enlarge your penis” shit is just not enough anymore. Oh well; there are more important things in life, I guess.

Which of course brings me to porn… I am under a rather strong compulsion to bring back many attractive Scandinavian lesbians for the enjoyment of my pseudo-frat-mates, and they’re always cheaper on DVD, right? So last night I finally made it down to Istedgade with a Danish accomplice, who explained the hierarchy of Danish porn stars to me and handled most of the talking (though I’m pretty certain I could successfully ask for “Scandinavisk lesbisk porno p dvd” in an emergency). As it turned out, I could have any two of the three necessary features in my porn (Scandinavian cast, rampant lesbianism, dvd format) but not all three at once - d’oh! The poor darbs will just have to be content with what I’m giving them.

Also, more fun from my referral logs: someone got here looking for “blog caltech”. It seemed like a reasonable thing to search for. And so I’ve found some random froshly blog, and have been playing guess-the-vaguely-described-upperclassmen. It’s a fun game, but I haven’t been doing so well at it, which makes me think that maybe Tech isn’t intolerably small after all and I just need to get out more. Heartening thought, that.

Yeah, I realize I’m far too cool for meta-blogland-games, but I’ve been playing with the social network explorer and, well, yeah. I’ve been led around in circles through the recommended links, which always seem to end here for some reason, and always seem to include at least one Scandinavian blog. In fact, the only foreign languages I randomly stumbled on were Danish and Norwegian, which is mildly disturbing. Not as disturbing as the fact that visitors to this site are guided to some 15 year old girl having hysterics over her dead cat, but still disturbing. I’m quite looking forward to the full working version of the thing, so I can be even more disturbed than I already am.

Addendum: how many people are sitting out there, writing blogs in some obscure language that almost nobody can read? After seeing how certain Danes can be convinced to switch into English, and spending all of two elitist seconds thinking about narcissism and the audience available to an English writer vs. someone writing in, say, Basque, I’m curious. I’ll take Danish as the dividing line between “obscure” and “common” languages - so do you know of any blogs written in a language with less than 5 million speakers? They could make for some fun reading, in that “hey, what a funny combination of letters they’ve got there!” sort of way.

I’ve done it; I’ve filled the bottom layer of one suitcase with clothes and crap I know I won’t need until California. The tangibility of it all is frightening; I don’t want to leave, and I especially don’t want to pay exorbitant shipping fees for the extra crap I’ve accumulated. Other things that I don’t want include the following:

• a giant chandelier covered in wet turquoise paint to suddenly descend from the ceiling above me
• a debt consolidation plan
• the eternal darkness of inter-galactic space
• to be hassled by Customs officials about the small quantities of alcohol I’ll be underagedly carrying in my luggage
• to be attacked by miniature bunnies

Most of the time my menstrual pimples are the little kind that you can scratch off without noticing, but this time they were all low-relief throbbing horrors. You know, the wide, flat kind where the zit-pus pressure builds up all day until you feel like your face is full of maggots. They’re mostly gone now, but between that and the bleeding and the foreshocks of an oncoming cold, the past couple days I felt like I was in the early stage of a radiation-induced transformation to Inside-Out Girl.

Unfortunately I didn’t gain any super powers.

There was an arrow where the sun used to be, over the blank in the skyline between Vesterbro and the south harbor, hanging over some invisible factory blowhole. It was outlined in pink, pointing north and just a little bit up. Following it, the wind kinked the clouds at a certain height, the top of a smokestack winked, the dark green blue dropped closer to the top of the Rdhus, and as the light faded it all turned west across the North Atlantic and outside the scatter of the atmosphere. I of course was left behind in the dark.

This afternoon I’ve been waiting for a booby-trapped magic wand to turn me into Frank O’Hara. That hasn’t happened, but I did see an awful lot of stylish chairs and a very nifty flying light bulb lamp.