I spent some unknown but very large number of hours this weekend reading the entire archive of comics at Questionable Content. There were a bit more than eight hundred of them. One of them really struck me. It was this one. Check out the very last word balloon.
As I write this, I am halfway through a bottle of Magic Hat beer. It's kind of wonky. Not wonky in the sense that it's stale or contaminated, but wonky in the sense that I don't really like it that much. It has a few too many flavors for my taste. I prefer light and simple beers, and I'm not really much of a big drinker. (With regards to alcohol is really the only way in which it can be said that I am a lightweight.) As I drink this beer, which I don't want to waste, I remember that I have tried Magic Hat in the past several times, always with similar results. Apparently I am partially immune to behavioral learning.
This reminds me of some other silly thing I did recently. Last year I was trying to find a new pair of sneakers. After exhausting, but probably not exhaustive, searching of the internet, I found a pair that I liked that seemed like it might be wide enough for my feet. I tried them out for a couple of days, and each day after a bit of walking I would have this awful pain in my feet. It felt like nails were being driven through the bottom. I thought this might abate when I wore them in, but after a week that didn't seem to happen, so I put them in the back of my closet. Periodically I would pull them out and try them out for a day, and then spend that night rubbing my feet and smacking myself in the head.
So remember that oddly unseasonal blizzard we got a week and a half ago? (I took a bunch of pictures during it. There's absolutely nothing remarkable about them, until you consider the date they were taken.) I was outside when it started snowing. It was late at night and I couldn't sleep, so I decided to go for a little jog. I decided to wear the devil-sneakers, figuring that.... actually, I can't even justify it. It was too dumb. So I started out, jogging and walking and jogging and walking. It was sprinkling rain when I started, but about halfway through it became freezing rain with a little snow thrown in, and I swear that the temperature dropped ten degrees. (I won't specify whether the degrees were Farenheit or Celcius, since it's just an estimate anyway, but isn't it kind of interesting that the two measures are different but both called "degrees"?) By then, of course, my sneakers had put the nails back in my feet again. My return trip to my apartment had an epic feel to it, like the seeker of truth hiking through snow-buried mountains searching for the ancient hidden monastery. I almost, almost took my shoes off and walked in my socks, but it just seemed to cold for that.
Evidently, I did make it back to my apartment. A hot bath did wonders, but the combination of the weather, the damn sneakers, and the unusual (for me) amount of exercise gave me a limp for the better part of a week.
Dear Lord, grant me the wisdom not to buy and Magic Hat beer for myself again, and never again to wear those evil sneakers. (I was thinking of doing a version of the entire Serenity Prayer, but I don't think it's worth the trouble. It wouldn't actually be that funny.)
Actually, the nice thing about being an alcohol-lightweight is that even half a bottle of beer affects me enough that it vastly improves the taste of the rest of the bottle.
Yesterday I went to the Ithaca Farmers' market with my friends Hannah and Josh. It was awesome. I absolutely cannot believe that I'd never been there before. It's set up right on the water of an inlet off of Lake Cayuga, and all the stands are set up in this giant beautiful wooden structure. I took a bunch of pictures, which you can see here. I would say more about it, but I think everything I wanted to say is in the captions to the pictures.
I didn't post the last picture I took on that role, and here is why. Josh and Hannah dropped me off at my apartment, and as I was walking towards my building I saw a small pack of little kids, all girls, walking ahead of me on the sidewalk wearing swimsuits and carrying towels. I was a bit confused, because we're not really very close to any water, and there's no swimming pool or anything. Then I noticed they were also carrying two large buckets filled with water, each with a plastic cup floating in them. They stopped on the sidewalk, and as I walked past I saw one of them pick up a cup, scoop up some water, and throw it at another girl. Then the other girl did the same thing to someone else. I thought this was absolutely hysterical, and took a picture. I took it from far away, so as not to seem like a pervert (although in retrospect I'm not sure which way I tipped the odds on that one). Unfortunately, the picture didn't really capture what was going on, nor even the fact that these were little girls. It just looks like a distance shot of some girls in swimsuits. But you should have seen them. It was so funny. They just stood there in a circle, throwing water at each other.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Cirque du so long, sucker!
I am very excited. Last night I finished my first draft of an actual math paper I've been writing. (It was actually my second or third draft, but it's the first draft I've submitted to my advisor for his perusal.) It's working title was originally Untitled paper, but more recently I've changed it to A convexity result for the involution fixed set of a Borel invariant variety. (I think I prefer the first one.)
There's nothing earth-shattering, or even really remotely important. It takes results from two papers that my author cowrote and mashes them together. My understanding is that at the end of last summer, or maybe at the end of winter break - I can't remember! - my advisor gave a talk at a workshop somewhere overseas. His talk included describing the results of these two papers, and saying that you could put these two results together. It was obviously true, but he thought about it and realized that it wasn't trivially true, so he put me to work on it, God bless him. It was probably more work for him to have me do it, since he had to guide me through most of it, so again, God bless him.
The title of this entry comes from something really cool I saw over the weekend. You may remember the TV show Mystery Science Theatre 3000, where a guy and a couple of robots (voiced by some other guy or guys) would watch old sci-fi movies and make fun of them. It was AWESOME. Well, some of the people involved set up a website called Riff Trax, where for a small fee you can download audio files that you play simultaneously with certain movies, which you have to obtain separately. The result is an MST3000-style situation, minus the robots. It's hysterically funny.
On Saturday my friends and I watched both The Matrix and Reign of Fire with Riff Trax accompaniment. (Of course, the former movie is spectacular, while the second is spectacularly awful, but vis-a-vis Riff Trax they are equally entertaining.) My favorite part was from the end of The Matrix, where Neo and Agent Smith are grappling on subway tracks as a train barrels down on them. At the last second, Neo does a slow-motion backflip off of the tracks onto the platform, dodging the train and leaving Agent Smith to get (temporarily) squished. (Of course, Neo probably only did a regular backflip, and the slow-motion was added later.) As this is happening, the Riff Trax audio says "Cirque du So long, sucker!" And just after that happened, I thought I was going to die for lack of air from laughing too hard.
I think I'm going to sign all of my future emails that way. (This is not strictly true. The first email I remember sending after seeing this was to my advisor, sending him my paper. I did not sign it that way. I hope.)
So how about this weather, huh? What an insane April! There are probably plenty of pictures posted already of all of the snow we've gotten, and unless they're dated, there's really nothing amazing about them. It's just snow! The only reason it's so remarkable is if you remember that a couple of days before you could wear shorts outside, comfortably. So instead I will post my reaction to going outside and finding all the snow.
Maybe I'll just send this photo at the end of every email instead. Hmmmmmmm......
There's nothing earth-shattering, or even really remotely important. It takes results from two papers that my author cowrote and mashes them together. My understanding is that at the end of last summer, or maybe at the end of winter break - I can't remember! - my advisor gave a talk at a workshop somewhere overseas. His talk included describing the results of these two papers, and saying that you could put these two results together. It was obviously true, but he thought about it and realized that it wasn't trivially true, so he put me to work on it, God bless him. It was probably more work for him to have me do it, since he had to guide me through most of it, so again, God bless him.
The title of this entry comes from something really cool I saw over the weekend. You may remember the TV show Mystery Science Theatre 3000, where a guy and a couple of robots (voiced by some other guy or guys) would watch old sci-fi movies and make fun of them. It was AWESOME. Well, some of the people involved set up a website called Riff Trax, where for a small fee you can download audio files that you play simultaneously with certain movies, which you have to obtain separately. The result is an MST3000-style situation, minus the robots. It's hysterically funny.
On Saturday my friends and I watched both The Matrix and Reign of Fire with Riff Trax accompaniment. (Of course, the former movie is spectacular, while the second is spectacularly awful, but vis-a-vis Riff Trax they are equally entertaining.) My favorite part was from the end of The Matrix, where Neo and Agent Smith are grappling on subway tracks as a train barrels down on them. At the last second, Neo does a slow-motion backflip off of the tracks onto the platform, dodging the train and leaving Agent Smith to get (temporarily) squished. (Of course, Neo probably only did a regular backflip, and the slow-motion was added later.) As this is happening, the Riff Trax audio says "Cirque du So long, sucker!" And just after that happened, I thought I was going to die for lack of air from laughing too hard.
I think I'm going to sign all of my future emails that way. (This is not strictly true. The first email I remember sending after seeing this was to my advisor, sending him my paper. I did not sign it that way. I hope.)
So how about this weather, huh? What an insane April! There are probably plenty of pictures posted already of all of the snow we've gotten, and unless they're dated, there's really nothing amazing about them. It's just snow! The only reason it's so remarkable is if you remember that a couple of days before you could wear shorts outside, comfortably. So instead I will post my reaction to going outside and finding all the snow.
Maybe I'll just send this photo at the end of every email instead. Hmmmmmmm......
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