News You Can Bruise for 2002 April 17

Wed Apr 17 2002 12:08: Went with Sumana to see a speech by Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct. It was pretty interesting; assuming one limits the universe of discourse to hour-long speeches about the past tense, it was one of the most interesting speeches one could possibly make. However, more interesting and fun was hanging out in a college cafe with Sumana, Adam Parrish, and Adam's friend Josh. I had more mediocre tiramisu. This is MEDIOCRE TIRAMISU WATCH, day 1,306! America held hostage... by mediocre tiramisu!

Wed Apr 17 2002 18:38: Playing Illuminati tonight with Jason and Manoj. Haven't done that for quite a while. I need to practice, as I'll probably be playing a lot of Illuminati next week with Susanna.

Wed Apr 17 2002 20:46: Sumana finds amusement in my pronunciation of the words "dinosaur", "whale", and "vegetable", so today I made some ASCII drawings of each to cheer her up:

                       _-_
                      / o_|
                     / /\ --Hello, Sumana! Rawr!
                    / /      . -  . -                _____
       ___----_____/ /      .   \. / .               \ / /
      -             /          __\/______________    /  /  
     /             /          /                  \  /  /
    / /  _____   _/          |   o                \/  /
   / /+ ||    | ||           |                       /
 _/ / | ||    | ||    Rawr!-- ========>            _/    v 
(__/  `_oo    `_oo            \___________________/    oOo@()-- Rawr!

Wed Apr 17 2002 22:21: Manoj won the Illuminati game, despite the fact that I had by far the best set of cards. Oh well. This breaks my streak of about 10 wins in at-work Illuminati games.

Due to various innovations I have developed, chief among them being tying the floss to the little plastic floss threader, I've been able to get my nightly flossing time down from 15 minutes to 4 minutes. This makes my daily tooth care routine much less onerous.

Wed Apr 17 2002 22:25: Pete Peterson II has oggs from a live performance of Last Transmission From Starbase XY003. I haven't listened to them yet, as I don't have an OGG player set up, but hey, it's Starbase XY003, so how can you go wrong? By not listening to it, that's how!

Update: There are MP3s as well.