... and someone else is hungry:

can you name some things that are salad?

I've been itching for an excuse to play with Google Sets - and now I'm disappointed. After feeding it "waldorf, potato, chicken, tossed, pasta" it only gave me "dressings, egg, fruit, cole slaw" in response. I think I'll stick to my Joy of Cooking, thanks.

But this more than makes up for being disappointed with a google-toy:

sometimes you are brilliant. I love you.

Aww. I love you too, unknown domain! But there's one thing I need to know before we can pursue a relationship: are you my mother?

I must remember to shut my eyes, plug my fingers in my ears and sing "la la la la la la" in a loud off key while I read my favorite international weblogs. At least, I must do that if I want to watch anything on English-language broadcast networks in the afternoon - there's always late-night KMEX.

And for those of you who thought Americans didn't watch soccer: we do. But we don't watch it in English, and we don't root for the US.

Someone can't wait for the next edition of the internets's favorite skvallerbladet:

Half-naked coed body-painting! Underwear sorority frolics! Enquiring
googlebots need to know!

While most of the men in this dorm (and several of the hot drunk bi girls as well) are madly in love with the Crown Princess Victoria (swedish bikini), she has yet to respond to our dinner invitation, nude or not. Speaking of googlebots, I fulfilled my case of search engine envy with a hit for "hummus history" yesterday - not to mention a string of things like "penis enlarge hack," "rhymes with green," "physics of a pogo stick" and, disturbingly, "Tinka pee site." Putting my entry titles into the titles of the individual archive pages seems to have paid off in a flood of Googliciousness.

Meanwhile, there are more important things at stake:

Which wire should I cut? The red one or the blue one?

Well, red wires tend to connect to the power supply. Cut the one that isn't the only thing keeping you from plummeting to certain death as you dangle over a pit of pointy sticks.

Recent discussion on the nature and meaning of blog-links leaves me craving a flashier pair of sneakers. If links are self-expression in the form of consumptive choices, what differentiates a link to Tom Tomorrow from the purchase of an F-350? Both are expressions of group affiliation: I am one of the liberals, I am one of the manly men. Whether or not one can properly define an individual as the intersection of many such groups - jesus fuck, man, I'm not touching that topic with a ten foot scrollbar.

Nevertheless, the question remains: do we really want to put our consumer choices on the same level as our secretive midnight poetry scribbles?
I would say so, if and only if we can get small Indonesian children to write our blogs at three cents an hour.

Speaking of sweatshops, I have two intrepid guestbloggers lined up for my finals week / Fish Lake Valley non-posting extravaganza. I'm sure either one of them alone could easily outdo my recent lackadasical posting rate with super flair and fabulosity, but there's still plenty of space left for you to join the fun. That bit about dubious recipes was total crap, by the way - I'm far too lazy to organize that sort of thing. So don't worry about being asked to do strange things, or participate in baffling group activities, or even post at all.

I'm really just here for the popularity contest.

As summer comes on, I think the mountains turn into transvestites. This week, Mount Wilson has been experimenting with a hazy smear of foundation, enough to conceal his jagged wrinkles but not quite enough to hide the sharp outlines at his peak. Soon enough, he'll blanket himself in flesh-toned smog, presenting us lowly residents of the foothills with a soft and feminine skyline.

There are more pictures in the photoblog, and there's a new loop on gabbro radio, all about fruit and right wing politicians.

I think you should mention on your main page when your photo blog is
updated... I always forget to check it!

I'll give it a shot, though I'll probably forget too, most of the time.

*cough*

The photoblog has been updated.

While we're on administrative details, finals week has started to stir its ugly head and mutter in its sleep. When the term is done, I'll make a run for the desert, for two weeks of geophysical goodness. Which all adds up to three weeks of not-much-blogging.

So I'm looking for a team of hardy guestbloggers - preferably around half-a-dozen people willing to make outlandish, unsubstantiated claims and test dubious new recipes for the last three weeks of June. Interested? Email.

So, the black plastic was pulled off early yesterday morning to reveal plywood temples, water balloons, zip cords that shriek and spark when you try to use them, and a hazy smear of little paper clues for the treasure-hunting hordes. I spent the day working on an artsy-fartsy S&M themed stack, taking black and white photographs of my friends, playing Statues in the middle of a yuppie pedestrian mall, having my stomach painted with henna.

The highlight of the day, though, was being led into a large whitewashed room where several bottles of tempera paint were waiting for us. It took about thirty seconds to strip down to our underwear and start flinging paint at each other, dancing and smashing our paint-slick bodies onto the walls. I haven't had so much fun since preschool.

Not quite the highlight of the day, but slightly more marketable to large audiences, was the presence of Jay Leno's camera crew. They were on campus to film some "wacky man on the street" segment - someone had tipped them off. As we walked by about 20 minutes before they were scheduled to start, a woman standing in a clump of Leno-people said "... now, these people..." and broke off to approach us.

"Do you guys want to stick around for a few minutes and say something to Jay Leno?"

We all looked at each other. "Uhhh... not really, no."

"Are you sure? Your parents would love to see you on national television!"

National Television! The way she said it, National Television should pull more powerfully than the One Ring, but none of us had anything interesting to say to Jay Leno. Anyway, she only wanted us because at that point I was wearing an inflatable elephant swim-toy on my head, and everyone else had hilarious gaudy jackets straight off the Dr. Who costume rack. So we left.

Pictures should be up soon.

Tonight, driving back from Target, L. had some peppy, sing-along-able 80s music in her car stereo. After a brief few blocks of caterwauling, I realized that it's been a long time since I've gone careening down a freeway, music pulsing just above the road noise, feeling reckless and unlimited, like I could be in Tijuana tomorrow morning eating gut-searing birria and catching up on my Mexican slang. Or sitting under the el in Chicago, as the case often was.

It's a feeling I associate with youth, or rather, young adulthood - a visceral sense of my enormous potential to drive places, to do things. When blind-hearted old fogies insist that I'm living the best years of my life, this feeling is what I think they are missing. Not to mention the fact that when you're young, you've got nothing better to do than drive around and beat your chest.

Lately I've been noticing my body, and how it craves sweet food less often than it used to, how it makes me wake up in the mornings, how it protests when I pull an all-nighter, how it makes me coo at babies (but only from a distance! I'm not that far gone yet!). It seems to be leaving adolescence, finally, so I've been feeling old. Responsible. Domesticated.

Fuck that.

Silly games from across the comment box:

Guess who!

Well, port324.ds1-ry.adsl.cybercity.dk, your ip address does narrow the options. Rasmus? Ralph?

i'm bored. please suggest an activity. i don't want to write this paper. i
would much rather do something else. but i'm feeling uncreative.

You got it; it's been a while since I've cleaned out my blog-buffer anyway. The first thing you should do is mark a moment of silence for the death of Stephen Jay Gould (a sappier, crappier article that does not require registration with the New York Times is here).

*pause*

Okay. Now, if you happen to know a woman who will let you get this close (or perhaps you are a woman yourself and in possession of a good mirror) you can tell her personality from the shape of her breasts. Mine are bell-shaped, though frankly it's a bit hard to tell from those pictures, making me simple-minded, honest, and prone to temper tantrums. Whatever.

I trust that the insights from the breast shape personality detector will keep you off the streets and out of trouble for a while. It's getting close to dinner time, so on with the twerky comments!

syenite

*sigh*

Good night.

And we're coming up on Ditch Day, where the seniors abandon campus after constructing elaborate little games designed to let you into their rooms (only after a day of labor) so you can have some treats. By this point, the whole campus has been cordoned off with black plastic and scribbled signs reading "Seniors Only!" save for a small twisty path we underclassmen can navigate to get to class.

Which is great, except that all my senior friends have vanished inside that black plastic, leaving me to sit alone, in the rain, with my homework, all week. Waah.

Meanwhile, via the den, we have another dissection of the blogging universe:

It seems that college bloggers share more than the compulsion to discuss their private problems in public; turns out they share the same problems as well they are unlucky in love, have no money, don't know what they want to do with their lives, don't like their classes, or their major, or their school. The average college blog is insipid only when it isn't inane.

Which isn't to say that all college blogs are the same. Although at bottom every blog has the same underlying premise "Hey, look at me!" plaintive pleas for cyber-sympathy manifest themselves in different ways.

We here at Green Gabbro pride ourselves on being insipid and inane, usually at the same time, and often we're irrelevant to boot. We also like kittens. Aww.