ross and moots! ross and moots!

Er, yes, indeed. I'm afraid I don't watch whatever television show you're chanting at, even if television is suddenly much safer now that campaign ads are gone.

(psst! have they gone yet? it's dark in here.)

They're gone. It's safe. You can come out now. Except for the barrage of silly questions.

what is this thing for anyway?

I don't know, Silly Reader. It's probably either a car part, a fashionable organizing device, or a gift item from the clearance rack.

I am going to borrow your pencil...please?

No.

what about the limestone?

Sure, you can borrow my limestone any time you want. I have only modest rustic construction and acid waste treatment needs, so I don't use it much.

why are blessings always in disguise? if I were a blessing, I'd be naked!

If blessings came naked, we'd never have them in the winter, because they'd get cold and leave. If I were a blessing, I would probably want to bundle up in snow pants most of the time. Snow pants are great.

i want

Don't we all.

A quickie, before I have to leave for class:

The chatterbox makes me want to, well, chatter ... I guess. Fuck it. I don't know, what I'm talking about.

I want to chatter too, though sometimes it seems like my chatterings are all the same and I'd rather just go see a movie. What movie, I don't know; it probably doesn't matter. I could chatter about how the current slate of movies is crap until The Two Towers opens, or else talk about bags of vegetables "reduced for quick sale" on Sundays at Ralphs, but I have to go to class.



How long is it until I can just give up on everything except baking, gardening and blogging about baking and gardening?

I was taking my last midterm this afternoon when a car drove by, with a speaker mounted on top, telling me to Vote Democrat in the same voice you'd use to tell people to Please Disperse Immediately after you'd found a great sale on pepper spray. It was quite a disappointment to peek out the window and see a brown sedan - a plain white van with painted windows would have made great theater. Or perhaps an armored SUV of some kind. The awkward postered blob car was just silly. So then I was glad I hadn't voted for many Democrats.



The thing about going third party is that I always have these twinges of regret once the polls are closed, even though I still think Gray Davis is a doody-head and we'd be better off with a slightly flaky fuzzy man from the fuzzy flaky party. Sixty percent of Angelenos think Davis is a doody-head, apparently, even the ones who voted for him, so for once I'm not alone. Maybe we all just like to use the word "doody-head" in political discourse.



It's the sort of thing I should crab at - faced with a slate of doody-heads, most people just stayed home. It's probably a sign that something is broken, and we need a charismatic politician to fix it for us. A "none of the above" option would be nice. But I'm too exhausted to care, because school has eaten up all my stress and angst and bitterness for the month. Yay physics!

Midterms make me want to throw things. Especially the way they work around here - we have an officially designated midterms weekend, over which we are expected to study for and take our exams, while the week before we have problem sets as usual. For added fun, on Friday I must hang out with lawyers and bring coffee to judges at some fancy-schmancy law conference.



Trying to be sympathetic, most profs are giving out no homework next week, but this will not stop me from turning into a quivering blob of jelly by a week from Tuesday.



No posts this week. If I do post, smack me.

Grease! Grease! Drip for us!

I suppose it's bad form to let one's front page scroll to nothingness. I'll try to stop doing that from now on. While I'm de-scrolling, there are some more chatterbox voices from the void:

i like donkeys

Dude, I think that's illegal. Or else not tasty. Or possibly both (probably both, if you're in Georgia). In any case, them's fightin' words, mate.

which would win in a fight? Fourier or Z-transform?

I have no doubt that Fourier could defeat the Z-transform; after all, he survived the French Revolution and has fists, while the Z-transform has only polynomials. His eponymous transform wins points for ubiquity, but loses twice as many for appearing in trickier spots on problem sets. My prediction: knockout in three rounds, but not until the Z-transform has suffered a nose bleed and had its boxing shorts ripped off (to the intense flusterment of several spectators who would really rather have left that sort of thing to the imagination).

I love how they crash and crumble, resting between the sweet thighs of mainland.

Orogenies like that are also best left to the imagination.

Truth comes in many forms. I am not one of them and that's no lie.

You mean smart ass paradoxes are the foundation of reality? Say it ain't so! Or at least write a rambling blog entry about the matter, quick!

Papa Blog: We've got to blog the magic blog,
or else Blogamel will blog the blog away!

Brainy Blog: That's obvious, Papa Blog. If you
blog the blog equations, you'll blog to the
obvious blogclusion that --

Blogette: Lookout! It's Blogamel! With his
evil Blog!

All the Blogs: Oh no! Blog for your lives!
We're blogged! Blog me! Run for the blog!
Save the blogs!(etc)

On a first sweep through the career fair, it appeared the tech sector economy was improving: the selection of recruitment toys was nowhere near the giddy heights of February 2020, but there were some clever folding water bottles, a sprinkling of t-shirts and tote bags, and many nearly novel novelty keychains. On a second sweep, it became apparent that about quarter of the companies there were the government (including all the ones with clever folding water bottles or tote bags), and fully half were private contractors for the Department of Defense. D'oh!



By-the-bye, I promise this blog isn't dead yet. It's just resting; pining for the fjords, if you will. I'll remember how to string two sentences together without putting hats on my letters or using the phrase "without loss of generality" and then you'll see.

Between a Canadian flatmate, a South African study partner and a Canadian professor who talks about Z transforms three hours a week, I've been beaten. Outstubborned. De-vernacularized. I've started calling zee zed.



It may seem trivial—even mildly advantageous, given that problems with Cs and Zs can get confusing late at night—but it's a bitter defeat. I have long defended the American use of "zee" based primarily on the fact that "zed" ruins the Alphabet Song, and secondarily on the fact that in principle, all language standards should come from the mouths of giant yellow bird-puppets. If we erode Big Bird's alphabet hegemony, what's stopping us from giving complete control over standard English usage to Elmo, or even the meep-meep muppets?



The E-Prime kidz might be happy - neither Elmo nor meep-meep muppets make much use of "to be". But Yami sad! Yami like zee! Yami go do physics. Meep meep, meep, meep meep.

The guy next to me on the StairMaster was climbing imaginary stairs like he was a champion cyclist. He was bent over the display, gripping the handlebars as though his balance depended on it. Every few seconds he would glance over his shoulder to check for the competition – or possibly he was trying to flirt with someone on the exerbikes.



I don't like to imagine what I look like at the gym; I know it must be silly. After all, everyone else looks silly, even the guy who clearly spends his every waking moment in the corner with the free weights. But they put mirrors up. So I know I look like I have a stick up my butt that's going to explode out my cheeks any minute. But I don't hang on to the equipment for dear life, ever. So there.

It's been a while since I last went through the email backlog...

i tried to view the 'neal pollack' site at work, but it was filtered, due to falling under the "tasteless" category. it's immediately going into my home bookmark.

That's what you get for having a "job" and going to "work". Really, though, I'm surprised what some people will consider tasteless and offensive. I'm even more surprised that corporate filters don't have a baldly-named category for "there's no way in hell this site will help us make money, so get back to work, bucko".

I lies in the moment of clarity, truth and honesty.

Er, is that like the moment of inertia? I'm confused.

mulletese twins

Aaaah!!! *explodes*

1. I grab the book, thwack the pages and shout "Make sense! Make sense!" - why doesn't it make sense? Will it make sense tomorrow after lecture?


2. How on earth do the pre-college science education people get the most well-stocked drinks fridge on campus, when the biologists are the ones with all the money?


3. Where's my nail clipper?