Well, it's alumni weekend here at Lake Wobegon, and the usual flocks of decaying engineers have swooped down on campus to peck at the bookstore's display of shameless biographies and clean their feathers at the free-flowing bar.

I was sitting in the lounge this morning, finishing up some math, when a man in a "50th year reunion" ribbon came up to ask about a painting that, once upon a time, had hung in the dining hall. I told him it had vanished from collective memory, whereupon he went into story mode.

"The last time I was here, somebody had hung that painting upside-down. I took it upon myself to fix it. I bought a poster of that so I could have it hanging in my kitchen. We used to dress in coats and ties for dinner, you know, and play bridge afterwards. The idea was to show that you were smart enough to get good grades without studying, so no one studied until midnight, after bridge."

"Gee, I'm glad we don't maintain that pretense any more, I'd be toast."

"Then I went to look at my old room and there was a girl living there. That took some getting used to."

"Oh."

There are moments, talking to old alums, when you instinctively look to the wife for help. There's always a wife, and she always listens to her husband's stories with loving indulgence. When she sees that you're starting to drift, she gently pulls him away for another trip to the salad bar or a closer look at the rose beds. None of this is to say that I don't enjoy hearing stories from old alums, of course - it really was interesting to find out that a particular bench has survived in the lounge for 50 years - but it's hard to maintain the interested nodding end of a conversation when you're worried about a lost minus sign.

Saw one of the pirated versions of Attack of the Clones last night; good god was it ever awful. Maybe not Highlander III awful, maybe not even Phantom Menace awful, but certainly Planet of the Apes awful. Awful enough that going to see the special effects in a theater Friday night - for free - sounds like a waste of a perfectly good Friday night.

Actually, I kind of liked the poor video quality, despite the sound blips. It removed the heavy stench of CGI-for-CGI's-sake and stripped the worst of the melodrama from the score. It also magnified the bad acting, but hey, life's a tradeoff.

One of my .sig files is:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When you're not looking at it, this signature says something else.

If you're wondering how you too can acheive such fabulous effects, you're not alone:

While not looking directly at it, I imaged your signature using several methods. A regular photograph of it showed the sig made derogatory remarks about my mother. A Kirlian photograph, however, revealed a purple outline of a leaf, including a part that had been erased two days ago. Interesting. Looking at a mirror, I noticed it said "Red Rum." Running it through the Mac speech utility, it said in an eerie british-fembot voice that you are a natural social butterfly who is able to carry out interesting conversations due to your open-mindedness and your cautious nature toward others. Finally, while closing my eyes and asking the nazi archaeologist next door to read it to me, he screamed and his face fell off.

How do I get my sig to do these things?

The trick is to make sure your sig is small enough to be governed by quantum uncertainty, which means that when your email client appends it to your message, it should do so at most one letter at a time. One bit at a time gives even more random results, but they tend towards meaningless and non-funny onomatopoeia. I once had a system that turned all of my sigs into quotes from Pokemon sequels if they were read in Braille; after adding a second 8086 processor and increasing the swap partition my sigs containted references to Gravity's Rainbow when smelled by an upside-down bloodhound, and spoke in tongues when poked with a pointy stick. Then I added more RAM, and the sigs just started to vanish when they weren't being looked at. For reference, ITS seems to crunch about half a letter at once.

Many antiquated systems automatically handle files in the quantum domain; if you can't downgrade your operating system, try removing most of the ram from your computer and/or generating high-resolution fractals in the background while you write your mail.

There's a new loop on gabbro radio. Go listen.

Someone's lost:

There must be some way out of here ...

Sure, but it'll take many lifetimes. But why would you want to leave, anyway? It's so warm and cozy here!

i want to know what love is

The one thing I've noticed is that people who run around telling other people what love is and is not, are usually trying to get them to adopt certain sexual habits. If I ever want to change your sexual habits, gentle reader, you can rest assured that I'll use good old-fashioned alcohol rather than wheedle around with this "if you really loved me, you'd put on a diaper and wrap me in bacon" crap. So instead, I asked google.

Thought I'd copy a meme and list the first lines from my favorite books. Only, my fiction-books are mostly in boxes and scattered to the four winds, so I'm giving you the first lines from some of my most beloved reference books.

Put this puzzle together and you will find milk, cheese and eggs, meat, fish, beans and cereals, greens, fruits, and root vegetables—foods that contain our essential daily needs. (Joy of Cooking)

C is a general-purpose programming language. (The C Programming Language)

Europe is many things to many people. (Europe on a Shoestring)

The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, continuing the policy of the past, is being revised at frequent intervals. (CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics - duh)

It's an interesting exercise that admits but one conclusion: no one ever reads the introductions to reference books. Ever. The second paragraphs and beyond are probably variations on the theme of lorem ipsum. I'd verify this, but my eyes slither off the page too quickly to tell, and before I can blink I'm looking up the atomic weight of arsenic.

Phugh, writing captions for more than a dozen photoblog entries was apparently all the writing I had in me today. Fortunately, there are comments that need smart-ass responses:

what do you do with a drunken sailor early in the morning? NEED URGENT
RESPONSE

Shave his belly with a rusty razor, among other things.

indian jones without his tail?

Would be a tailless indian jones, yes. And what a sad thing that is to behold.

Frank Capra, esteemed director of feel-good 50s flicks, was actually an engineer with a degree from Caltech who felt compelled to give his alma mater the deed to his ranch outside San Diego. So that's where I was yesterday and most of today - lounging on Frank Capra's patio, drinking gallons of fresh-squeezed lemonade and hobnobbing with yellowing photographs of movie stars. There are pictures, as many as I could fit onto my tiny 8MB memory card, which was not nearly enough - it's high time, I think, to spend more money on technology, grab extra memory and a USB smartmedia-reading device and while I'm at it, would anyone listen to me if I bought a microphone and did a talk show? - and they'll be in the photoblog shortly. I had to come back early for a band concert this evening, though, and since everyone else is still lounging in the avocado capital of the universe I'm spending a quality evening with myself, some cookies and some computer.

Anyway, the concert was at 8, I'm supposed to be there around 7:30, and at 7:15 I realize my pantyhose has vanished to odd-sock-land and I haven't shaved my legs in months. Which is all well and good and I can shave in the sink... except my otherwise long skirt has a slit in the back that requires me to shave past my knees, making for some really awkward positioning. After twenty minutes of teetering and tottering and splashing soapy water all over everywhere and discovering that yes, my right sandal really is in the box with my old physics notes, I'm out the door without a scratch on me. Hooray!

It's only when I'm halfway across campus that I remember I forgot to buy a contribution of juice, and notice that my hemline is falling apart. It's not until I've unpacked my things that I remember I forgot to do anything about the corks that fell off my straight mute. And once I'm home after a reasonably successful performance, I discover that my fly was open the entire time.

Thank god for long shirts, and all's well that ends well.

Someone responds with a jolly old jingle:

Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't!

This is true. To be perfectly fair, though, one would also have to include the fact that sometimes you feel like a banana, and sometimes you don't. Right now I feel like a banana.

cut the mullet...

I've made a solemn vow to a friend of mine that if I ever cut my hair, I will first cut it into a mullet and take a picture. Then I will cut the mullet.

It's a helluva thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got, and all
he's ever gonna have. [William Munny, killer of women and children - and Little
Bill, for what he did to Ned.]

Yup. Today, I walked down to the geology building with a couple of friends, because they were giving away a bunch of old maps. My friends were carrying sledgehammers, just because. The grad students looked at us funny.

I wanna be sedated!

Don't we all? Try this new blog I've been slowly picking up - it's all the excitement of psychiatric nursing, with none of the slobber.

hast thou seen this?: http://www.snowplow.org/furiousgeorge/

So the thing about not having flash installed, is that I have to deal with the default plugin dialog box every time I blink. I mean, I can't even use my friggin' mouse wheel without repeating that yes, I really truly am too lazy to download a new plugin today. So I haven't seen it... but I finally gave in and installed flash, I'll check it out once I restart mozilla.

Yablonovite rocks!

Mmm, yablonovite. Yablonyablonblonblonblon... blrblblblblblblblrrbrbrbrbrbr... and that's how long it takes to get me to start flapping my lips with my finger. Hoo yeah.

this is not the world
in which we live. few things are
more obvious than

good incubators
these ideal husbands are small
and fat: well equipped

females and males of
a single species exploit
the environment

covered with liver
spots and lacking real teeth would
be desired as much

in both range size and
spatial performance is at
least temporally

expected to treat
kinship as most important
in determining

that when EDD
detects eye-like stimuli
it fixates on these