I live in a desert. It's not supposed to rain like this.

At least, not when I've got laundry out.

You knew the crazy-sweet ultimate ninja page would generate parodies. You knew it. So did I. So did all those real ultimate electrical engineers.

1. EEs are mammals.
2. EEs solve equations ALL the time.
3. The purpose of the EE is to flip out and write matlab code.

Yup. It's all true. I knew a EE once, she was eating pie, she heard me dissing Bessel functions and she chopped my head off with her soldering iron! Then she shoved calculators up the noses of everyone in the restaurant!! Now that's what I call REAL ultimate power!!!

I mean, back to work I go, hi ho, hi ho!

Now that the war's gone dull, there's lots of people arguing about which country gets to be the 51st United State: Iraq? The UK? Germany?

What these people are forgetting, of course, is that there are already way more than 50 states. Canada became a State quite a long time ago, possibly even before Alaska and Hawaii, but no one recognized it until the debut of Canadian Bacon in 2020, so Canada is the 51st. Puerto Rico may or may not end up as the 52nd, but it's had so many silly referendums about the issue that it deserves to have a place saved in line. So we're currently looking at candidates for 53rd and 54th states, not 51st. Unless there are other states I've forgotten about; in 4th grade when we had to memorize all the states and their capitals, our maps were so obsolete they still included the Soviet Union, so it shouldn't be surprising if I've missed a few.

My student housing comes with maid service every other week, which is wonderful - there's no way any of us would remember to clean the toilets otherwise. But every time the maids clean the bathroom, they put my tube of toothpaste in the drawer, while leaving my bathroommate's out on the counter.

Needless to say, I am mystified. I don't think they know who owns which toothpaste, so they probably aren't taunting me for my lack of Canadian citizenship. It might be an attempt to enforce some kind of counter symmetry, since my toothpaste lives on the left side of the sink with the toothbrush cup, the Listerine, the hand soap, the spare conditioner and the shaving accessories, while my roommate's lives on the right side with only a half-empty bottle of cough syrup and some saline solution for company. Or the maids might not like the Aquafresh package design. Or it's something to do with aliens and tarot cards and how we're actually all living in 70 A.D.; who knows?

It's probably time to go make fun of Canada for a while; that often solves many mysteries.

The thing I like about New World letter grades (as opposed to numerical marks) is that you feel ever so special when you get a vowel. I got a bunch of I's last term, seeing as how I was in Iowa most of finals week; now I'm debating the merits of putting an E on top of one of my I's to make a singable nonsense song in the registrar's computer (E is a special Caltech grade that stands for "Extension" - which is something sympathetic profs are allowed to give well past the end of the grading period). First, however, I will spend some time running around like a chicken with its head lopped off, trying to finish last term and keep up with the current one.

If I had actually done half the things I was planning to do last weekend, this wouldn't be quite so much of a problem; but I didn't. I did, however, acquire a nice pair of shoes and a large cast iron skillet for the princely sum of $5. Hollywood always has the best garage sales.

They've found a specimen of ginormous squid, more or less intact. I always forget about the parts of the world that can still be mapped in pictures of dragons and sea serpents - probably because nobody actually draws dragons on maps any more, which is a damn shame.

I'm taking two paleobiology courses this term, as a hopefully gpa-enhancing lark. I spent two hours yesterday discussing various ways to make squiggly marks on rocks [link is only useful to those with a privileged IP address, sorry], and this morning watched a video on cnidarians prior to discussing various extinct things that might or might not be sponges. I'm going to start doodling dragons on my notebooks.

Here's one I found through the referral logs: WebCollage, a splattered collection of random internet pictures. You'd think there'd be lots of porn, but amazingly enough, you'd also be wrong.