Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2001 November

# 01 Nov 2001, 08:55AM: Aaron Sorkin often has various characters in "The West Wing" say the same line throughout an episode. "Did you get the new EPA stats on child asthma?" repeated various characters to Josh last night. They also inform each other of things they already know. "We don't have the votes for an override." "We need a whip count." "Seven Republicans just said they're not coming." "The chemical abbreviation for table salt is NaCl."

One reason for this trope -- a trope that Leonard noticed last night -- is to intensify the dramatic sense of the White House as a single entity with many mouths. They try out soundbites on each other, they care about the same things, they intensely focus on the same issues simultaneously, they try to back each other up.

Another reason might be so Aaron Sorkin can save time using copy-and-paste instead of having to write new dialogue.

# 01 Nov 2001, 09:33AM: Defensive patriotism: My parents hang a little US flag in their car, held in place by the sunshade for the front passenger seat. A few days ago, I sat there and the thing dangled right over my head. Damocles' flag.

# 01 Nov 2001, 09:33AM: Avoiding dangling participles in Russian class:

"I can hear the TV and I can hear Pavel."
"But can the television hear you?"
"Ahhh... Televizor, eto Bolshoi Brat. [Television, it is Big Brother.]"

# 01 Nov 2001, 09:34AM: Yesterday afternoon, I saw a young Sikh boy turn the corner of Milvia and Channing, carrying a cricket bat. Cricket! Crikey! I wonder if there are cricket pickup matches at some undisclosed location in Berkeley. Maybe Victory Park.

# 01 Nov 2001, 09:50AM: I attended Professor Reginald Zelnik's office hours earlier this semester. He teaches Imperial Russian History -- and quite well, too, if I may add. I waited outside as he talked with another student. A woman came by and waited with me. She said that she was a history graduate student and that he was her advisor.

Me: "So, what do you study? What's your topic of interest?"
Her: "I study the Soviet circus."
Me: "The circus?"
Her: "Yeah. You know. The circus. Acrobats, three rings, trapeezes."
Me: "Oh. I thought maybe 'the circus' was some Soviet purge I didn't know about."
Her: [laugh] "Oh, we in history don't do political history anymore. It's all cultural now."

# 01 Nov 2001, 09:56AM: I wrote a poem a few weeks ago. Here it is.

Consistency Bias
Negotiating with a terrorist!
I did it every day -- no gracious dance
Would save me from my dad. There's no romance
In my dark ages. I could make a list
Of times that tyrant, no Objectivist,
Denied my self, my freedom, any chance
Of sane cognition sans his dissonance.
By heart I know the times he made me pissed.
A monster? No. My data's anecdotal.
But, tell me: can you trust to recollect
All of the good your nemeses have done?
I battle with my memory, subject
As it must be to evidence too modal.
I've washed my brain and made the colors run.

# 01 Nov 2001, 10:06AM: I found myself, over the past few days, repeating "Happy Halloween!" in a strange, half-macabre voice. Yesterday, I finally remembered why. When I lived in Freeborn Hall, I knew Mike Carns, and his aunt had given him a small stuffed animal shaped like a ghost. When one shook it, it said, "Aahahahaha! Aahahahaha! Aahahahaha! Happy Halloween!" in a voice less spectral than toddlerish. We all got sick of it after a week.

# 01 Nov 2001, 10:44AM: Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram went to the same high school. Also, a band exists entitled "Stanford Prison Experiment."

One reason I was poking around for information relating to Zimbardo: I've recently started using the phrase, "Because I know you're a nice guy," and Leonard and I figured out last night why it creeps him out. In a video ("Quiet Rage") about the Stanford Prison Experiment, a student who had played a prisoner conversed with a student (nicknamed "John Wayne") who had played a guard, and been the most vicious. After the experiment:

"Prisoner 416": "It let me in on some knowledge that I've never experienced first hand. I've read about it, I've read a lot about it, but I've never experienced it first hand, I've never seen someone first hand turn that way. And, I know you're a nice guy, you know."
"John Wayne": "You don't know that."
416: "You understand, I do, I do know you're a nice guy."
John Wayne: "Then why?"
416: "I don't, I say that because I know what you can turn into, I know what you're willing to do if you say, oh, well, I'm not going to hurt anybody, oh, well, it's a limited situation, or it's over in 2 weeks."
John Wayne: "Well, if you were in that position, what would you have done?"
416: "I don't know. But I think, if I were a guard, I wouldn't have been quite so imaginative. I wouldn't have applied quite as much creativity to it as you did. I would have played the role, I wouldn't have made it such a masterpiece."

John Wayne had been really sadistic, especially towards 416. And so you can hear the bitterness (there's a link to a RealPlayer video of the conversation here) that the ex-prisoner's trying not to let through in his voice. He exaggerates a bright, cheery tone. And it comes through the most when he says, "And I know you're a nice guy." So that's why it's creepy.

As it turns out, the person who stopped the experiment by pointing out to Zimbardo its inhumanity later married him. Imagine if it hadn't been his girlfriend who told him! They had a big fight over it! Would the experiment have continued for another eight days, finishing up the planned two-week run? Would someone have died?

# 01 Nov 2001, 12:34PM: Ooh ahh, ooh ahh, ooh ooh diddy, tell me about the anthrax found at a mail processing facility in Kansas City.

In retrospect, I was kinda foolish to hope that anthrax would confine itself to the East Cost.

# 01 Nov 2001, 05:42PM: I find David Denby's Slate article on how Americans can spread the good word (We aren't so bad, here's what's good about our culture) inspiring in a way I have never been inspired before.

# 01 Nov 2001, 05:58PM: Tonight Leonard and I are going to see The Man Who Wasn't There, the new Coen brothers flick, at a free campus preview. Ads and reviews describe the film as a noir sendup. We'll see. If I'm lucky, I'll see Kenny Byerly there.

# 02 Nov 2001, 07:24AM: My dad doesn't like that I posted that poem about him. What else is new?

# 02 Nov 2001, 07:57AM: My parents came over and spent the night because they went to my sister's employer's annual banquet. I declined to have breakfast with them and my sister this morning.

Maybe the best way to keep my dad from reading my journal is to say to him, "Dad, read my journal, really, I wish you would read my journal." But then this morning I actually loaded it up for him on the old Compaq. Even though he'd had no opinion on "Consistency Bias" when he'd read it last night, today he didn't like that I had posted it for all to see. "What will people think?" he asked. "They'll think that I wanted to write a poem about you," I answered.

# 02 Nov 2001, 08:04AM: Cold and fog mark the weather this morning. Before my parents drove away, I helped them wipe the condensation off the car windows with spare paper napkins from a fast-food joint. They handed the dirty, wet brown napkins to me to throw away when we were done.

Years back, when I had first moved into this apartment, I had a little ritual I performed when my parents drove away after visiting me. I would run on the sidewalk, on my side of the street, as though I were running after their car, and then when they accelerated away I stopped and I waved until they had far outdistanced me, and then I would go back to my apartment.

But today I just said goodbye and waited till the traffic slowed and crossed the street and threw away the napkins in the dumpster they emptied this morning and went back inside.

# 02 Nov 2001, 08:10AM: It turns out I am going to breakfast with my parents. See you later.

# 02 Nov 2001, 10:33AM: My parents and my sister and I went to breakfast at Venus. They gave me money even when I said I didn't need it. My mom noticed that I like floating candles and she gave me four of them. They offered me a ride home but I preferred to walk.

This entry is the sestet. The one two entries ago was the octave.

# 02 Nov 2001, 06:49PM: The other day I lined up to get into a BART car and I smelled some sort of perfume that, I presume, one of the women in the line was wearing. On several occasions, I have smelled such scents in women's magazines (e.g., ym, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen). Advertisers place scented strips -- samples of ther perfumes -- next to pictures of glamorous women or forests or decadent soirées or intimate romance.

But when I smelled that perfume, the most immediate association wasn't to glamor or romance. I thought, "Oh, that smell reminds me of reading ym."

# 03 Nov 2001, 08:33AM GMT+5:30: What have I been reading? The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman, and Peter Maass's articles.

Filed under: Reading

# 03 Nov 2001, 10:03AM: Scary look-alikes:
I have an uncle who looks a heck of a lot like Saddam Hussein.

I just saw my landlord downstairs, and yet again confirmed that he looks a heck of a lot like Jack Kevorkian.

A somewhat longer story: I theorize that people in their standardized ID photos look like either terrorists or drug addicts. My Indian cousins confirmed this when I visited them three years ago. They said that my college ID photo makes me look like the woman who assassinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. In other words, not only do I look like a terrorist, but I resemble one terrorist in particular!

# 03 Nov 2001, 10:07AM: The Man Who Wasn't There. I'd seen three other Coen Brothers movies (Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Big Lebowski). Now that I've seen four, I can be pretty sure that I like the brothers' work. The clincher: a visual reference to the double-slit experiment, using the shadows of prison bars.

I hadn't watched a film in a very, very long time. I had forgotten what artistry in film could be, how really good cinema creates the extraordinarily absorbing experience that Pauline Kael hailed so.

As I learned last semester in 1939 Films, in film noir, the plot must always take a back seat to atmosphere. Mood and tone are the much more important effects. The shadows, well, overshadow the things that make them. And the Coens get this.

# 04 Nov 2001, 07:51AM: Last night I prepared a salad with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, olives, black beans, and Annie's Tuscan salad dressing. I also ate Near East garlic and herb rice pilaf. This was the best meal I've had in quite a long time.

# 04 Nov 2001, 09:23PM GMT+5:30: Today was the first time in ages that I've started and finished a book in the same day. Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog amused me and certainly pulled me along. She surprised me in the intricacy of her plot, and in the relative lack of frustration for her protagonist/narrator. Usually she takes great glee in throwing every conceivable obstacle in your path. (I've already complained about this.) This time, certainly I encountered pages that made me say, "Argh!" and put the book down for thirty minutes. But it didn't nag me as much as it has in her short stories.

Overall, I see this book as a cross between two of her other books, Bellwether and Doomsday Book, both of which I own and have read. I didn't find this book as emotionally moving as Doomsday Book, nor as annoying as Bellwether.

Next: study for Russian test tomorrow.

Filed under: Reading

# 05 Nov 2001, 01:16PM: I skipped handball and studied for my Russian test. I might have even done well on it. Won't know for a week. I also turned in my long-delayed sochinenie (essay), which I wrote on the topic of "suggestions to a friend who wants to buy a computer."

While studying, I found two allegedly Russian proverbs. One: "Don't bring your own charter to a monastery." Idiomatic English translation: "When in Rome, do as the Romans." Another: "It's like bringing your own samovar to Tula [where samovars are made]." Idiomatic English translation: "It's like bringing coals to Newcastle [where coal is mined]."

Now to choose interesting and eclectic classes for next semester. I can take almost entirely what I want, since I've fulfilled (almost) all of my requirements.

# 05 Nov 2001, 04:51PM: I went to another of Alexei Filippenko's Astronomy 10 lectures today. I've heard terrific praise of him all the years I've been at Cal. And it's quite true. If my Computer Science 3 professor had been this inspiring, and Simon Stow hadn't been such a charismatic and fantastic instructor for Political Science 2, maybe I'd have majored in something that could get me a job.

Filippenko strongly resembles Robin Williams. Filippenko's sense of humor does not rise to Williams-level zaniness -- a boon, since that sort of thing could tire me out after thirty minutes, much less fifty -- but Filippenko has the same grounded-in-the-subject humor as Reginald Zelnik, my Imperial Russian History professor.

Today, for the first time, I really tried to imagine how far the Earth travels every year. 584 million miles, I learn. Sagan's blue-green dot, er, speck, hurtling through space! The great black void!

It makes me want to hug someone for protection against the vacuum.

# 05 Nov 2001, 04:56PM: Joke that Professor Filippenko read in lecture:

Please stop jumping up and down on my wooden board. I'm trying to keep my Planck constant.

# 06 Nov 2001, 01:04AM: I'm catching up on e-mail while listening to this terrific CD of mp3'd music that Steve gave me. That is, he gave me the media, the CD itself. Whether he gave me the music...well, I wouldn't want to claim any property rights that I don't have, so I'll just leave that ambiguous.

I meant to go to Steve's Halloween party last weekend, but I fell asleep at 8pm that evening, full of pilaf and salad and contentment, and I woke momentarily at 11:45 or something and resigned myself to missing the party. It's too bad. I wanted to go, if only to push myself to develop a costume, and because I missed Steve's last party. Is there some dark force keeping me from Steve's parties? Time will tell.

By the way, this picture of me has these weird historical associations which I just mentioned in an email to Devin, and this Salon story made Alexei and me guffaw rather explosively. We read the pulpy, noir-y parts aloud together. Isn't "Stoner Mayhem" sort of a name for an event or athlete? Isn't the last paragraph of that article a jarring contrast to everything but the beginning, of which it is a clone?

# 06 Nov 2001, 01:15AM: Rich Fromm, a.k.a. The Guy I Met on BART, on avocadolounge.org:

well, "we" is really just my house. which also happens to have a bar.

# 06 Nov 2001, 01:20AM: I had a rather eventful evening. I practiced my handball with Robin (not the same Robin with whom I studied history a week ago, for the midterm on which I got a lower score than I had on the previous midterm, despite having studied harder over less material!). Handball Robin helped me out quite a bit by getting me to relax. "It's natural. Trust yourself," Robin kept saying, but the true accomplishment was that I believed it.

Later, I had Alexei over for dinner, finishing off the salad fixins and consuming more pilaf. We had a grand time, at one point disputing "Big Rock Candy Mountain" lyrics -- it seems that every web site has a different version -- and implications.

I really should go to sleep soon, even though I don't have class till eleven tomorrow. I mean, the principle of the things. As well, I might want to go to one of Filippenko's Star Parties this week, and rested Sumana would enjoy that better than wired-tired Sumana.

# 06 Nov 2001, 12:18PM: I got this very surprising good and fast grade on the Russian test I took yesterday. I got an almost perfect score on the listening section, and five out of five points for the bonus "my best or worst day" essay. Yippee!

Susanna and I talk a lot about our various Slavic language experiences. I'm trying to come up with some crackpot theory about the causal relationship between knowing Leonard and studying a Slavic language.

# 06 Nov 2001, 12:21PM: My dad told me about this Indian news-site's article about the Indian prime minister's visit to St. Petersburg. I find it refreshing that Atal Bihari Vajpayee can say, in good conscience, "I must confess that I am not an intellectual," and mean it without sarcasm.

# 06 Nov 2001, 12:24PM: I'm sort of starting to write short fiction again. I might even submit something to one of these contests open to UC Berkeley undergrads. Or even submit to the Berkeley Fiction Review.

# 06 Nov 2001, 12:36PM: A.O. Scott of The New York Times says of John Travolta (with special regard to Domestic Disturbance), "It is hard to think of anyone who has wasted so much talent in so many bad pictures." A quick look at his filmography reminds me of Look Who's Talking and, even more inexcusably, Look Who's Talking Too. Is there anything that will get you kicked out of the Screen Actors Guild? Mike Parsons, I'm asking you.

# 06 Nov 2001, 03:43PM: Professor John Searle, philosopher of the mind and language and consciousness, speaks at Black Oak Books in Berkeley this Thursday evening at 7:30. As per a previous entry, I suggest picketing Prof. Searle with signs reading, "If Computers Can't Think, We Can't Either!" or something else suitably catchy.

# 06 Nov 2001, 04:32PM: Every once in a while, you think, "oh, people have gotten it, Narcissus doesn't have any more minions through which to construct web pages." And then you look up your friends' enemies. The self-indulgent neurosis just keeps coming and coming, as though from some bubbling sewer that no one's inspected in years. Gaah.

# 06 Nov 2001, 04:37PM: John got my letter (which included a BBC) in less than a week! I was expecting another Ice Age to pass before the mail moved east.

# 07 Nov 2001, 02:01PM: Another lunch with Brandon. I told all sorts of high school stories starring Aaron Benavidez and Ana Cruz and Angel Ayon and even other people whose names don't begin with the letter A, such as myself. Also discussed: high school standardized tests, Sociology 3 with Andrew Creighton (a class we both attended even though we weren't enrolled because Creighton is the best lecturer I've ever seen), math and physics jokes, and Salon.

I proposed that Salon systematically opposes the conventional wisdom, right or wrong, out of principle. Brandon suggested the use of a lookup table for such an endeavor. It sounds as though it could work...but could it go wrong?

# 07 Nov 2001, 04:12PM: A photographer snapped my visage for the yearbook. In two to four weeks, I should receive proofs so that I can pick a shot to represent me for posterity.

I ended up putting down silly answers to the questions on the Senior Survey, profound and superficial alike. After all, should Ezra Pound ("Make it new") and Jack Citrin ("Satisfice and move on") really have the same representation in a person's store of wisdom?

# 07 Nov 2001, 04:36PM: This entry indeed does reference my recent Segfault story on 'Salon headlines you won't see' rather indirectly.

# 07 Nov 2001, 05:33PM: John's picture reminds me of his difficulties (back in St. Petersburg) in getting merchants to understand that he wanted a "Mountain Dew." If John were a Wiccan, Mountain Dew would be his familiar.

From an email exchange two months ago:

>       I just thought, "I should shower."  The sad thing is that I did
> shower, four hours ago.  I've been sitting in front of the computer for
> almost all the intervening time.  And eating microwave dinner for
> breakfast.  Shame.

*sucks down some more Mountain Dew and chinese food*

-- John Stange

# 08 Nov 2001, 09:02AM: Enterprise and The West Wing were both non-bad last night. Enterprise certainly didn't reach the same heights as it did last week. A rather interminable "answering schoolchildren's questions" sequence really didn't seem to have much purpose. The away team on the comet acted stupidly. But I'm rapidly coming to understand T'Pal as the most interesting character on the show, and I look forward to seeing what happens between her and the Dubya act-alike chief engineer.

The West Wing--it's tough to watch recent episodes with people who have missed a week. I didn't care for the sports-betting patter, but the revelation about Leo's wartime service made up for it, as did the penny trivia and my favorite line of the episode, possibly the season. President Bartlet on the Second Amendment: "Can't we just agree that it's a stupid-ass amendment?" Maybe I don't agree, but the line made me laugh.

# 08 Nov 2001, 10:37AM: So I listen to NPR and sometimes browse magazines and news-supply websites (e.g., Slate and Salon). Here's something I know I'm not alone in noticing:

The consensus seems to have arrived: the shorthand for referring to "the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th" is "September 11th" or even "nine-eleven." When referring to the anxiety, increased alertness, anthrax scares, loss of civil liberties, war with Afghanistan, hastened economic recession, surges in outward shows of patriotism and bipartisanship, and other effects of the terrorist attacks, use "recent events," "all of this," "recent times," or similarly vague phrasing.

It's as though the notion that these are all components of some coherent national mood, and that the listener/reader knows this, is as implicit and taken-for-granted as the fact that George W. Bush lives in the White House and San Francisco is in California.

Orwell taught me to trust specifics and distrust easy, common generalities. What does it hide to say "September 11th" instead of spelling out the causes of current actions and attitudes? This phrasing implies that something unprecedented and ahistorical happened on September 11th, and focuses the listener on the events and their aftermath rather than their causes. Using "all of this" or "the current crisis" or "recent events" glosses over the actual actions and agents -- who is doing what to whom -- and keeps a person from specifically tracing and considering each trend and reaction. "After all, we're all a little nervous right now" and "the country right now" let the listener or reader forget that some people (e.g., Muslims, Middle Eastern people or those who resemble them, civil libertarians), in the US and abroad, have more to worry about than others, thanks to their neighbors and from the US government.

I know that most people who will read this try to make allowances for such insinuations when they use the mass media. But I find people around me using such phrases, too. Sure, we all need shorthand and abbreviations. But I want to kep track of how the way that we abbreviate important ideas makes certain thoughts easier than others.

# 08 Nov 2001, 12:35PM: So, do the medical facilities of the country still lack for blood? I saw a Red Cross volunteer handing out "Please give blood" flyers on campus today. Under questioning, she admitted that she did not know whether there is still a blood shortage.

I have no objection to giving blood. I just want to know how I can know that it won't go to waste. The Red Cross volunteer hazarded a guess that the Red Cross website would tell me how badly it needs blood, but doesn't the Red Cross have a vested interest in telling me a particular answer?

# 08 Nov 2001, 07:35PM: I'm at Jeana's!

# 09 Nov 2001, 01:38AM: When I make analogies, I want them to be as erudite as "Setting up sound in linux is about as intuitive as German philosophy in the 19th century."

# 09 Nov 2001, 12:59PM: Red Cross: Steve pointed out to me that: (1) blood banks can separate out, say, plasma from whole blood and maybe keep that fresher longer than whole blood, and (2) the Red Cross doesn't need blood if there's not a shortage (unless they're vampires), and (3) sometimes blood banks lack more of one blood type than of another. As well, a recent Slate article explains that the Red Cross took this opportunity to expand its reserve, which is good.

# 09 Nov 2001, 01:32PM GMT+5:30: Crying: Last night I read Harlan Ellison's Paladin of the Lost Hour and cried. I've been thinking that nothing lasts. Sherwood Anderson has this great line in Winesburg, Ohio, in the short story "Sophistication."

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. ... He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun....

The sun is like time. It nurtures us, it lets us grow, and then it kills us. This particular melancholy thought I first had about three years ago.

(Whilst looking up "Paladin," I found another story by Ellison, "Susan", which speaks to the same sorrow.)

I woke up this morning to National Public Radio. Various listeners spoke of how their lives have changed in the past two months, because of the immediate shock of the terrorist attacks on New York and D.C., and because of the war, antiterrorism actions, and other terrorism-related recent events. One woman joined the Peace Corps. One American Literature class can relate better to Bradstreet, Sandburg, Whitman, and Ginsberg.

I've been paranoid and melancholy for years. The recent terrorist attacks just confirmed it.

Filed under: Reading

# 09 Nov 2001, 01:39PM: My Slavic language class is discouraging me, but on the up side, I went to Jeana's last night and baked cupcakes for her whole house. She's so sweet. The frosting was also super-sweet. Too much sugar, not enough chocolate. I saw lots of people I knew via classes and via other people I knew. Jeana and Adam (her boyfriend) were quite surprised.

This (completely truthful!) entry brought to you by Sumana Pretending To Be Susanna. More than a hundred cupcakes. Really.

# 09 Nov 2001, 04:50PM: Prof. Filippenko (who studied under Richard Feynman, as I learned today) played a funny bit from Futurama and Monty Python's "The Galaxy Song" in lecture today. I must have heard that song once in the last three years, and yet the last memory I have of hearing that song is from my freshman year, back in Freeborn Hall. My next-door neighbor played it via an mp3 via MacAmp and we danced around the room. How very long ago that was.

There are still people who use Yahoo to search the Internet. Why?

# 09 Nov 2001, 04:51PM GMT+5:30: I have to read Fathers and Sons by Turgenev over the weekend. Good thing it'll actually interest me.

Filed under: Reading

# 10 Nov 2001, 02:06PM: It took me something like 20 minutes of searching to find the year in which Donald A. Norman, cognitive scientist, was born. It's 1935, just so you know, and I finally hit upon it by googling "cognitive science biographies" and finding this useful list.

# 11 Nov 2001, 11:08AM: Is there a porn search engine entitled "Ass Jeeves"?

# 11 Nov 2001, 11:19AM: More Red Cross madness!: From Today's Papers:

The WP front gives the misstepping Red Cross more bad press. It seems that the Red Cross over-collected blood after Sept. 11 and now will have to burn the extra since it will go bad. Worse, the organization knew that the blood it was encouraging people to give would not go to victims of Sept. 11, and it told donors their blood would be frozen for future use even though it did not have the resources to freeze large amounts of blood.

# 12 Nov 2001, 11:26AM GMT+5:30: Frustration. I tried to buy some stamps at a vending machine in the post office annex on Allston Way. It ate my $4.00 and gave me back 60 cents in change but did not give me my book of ten first class stamps. (What went wrong? I assume the book didn't drop from its holder, but since the machine -- like too much government -- was nontransparent, I couldn't tell.) Since it's the Monday after Veterans' Day, the main post office was empty of all but the homeless seeking shelter from the rain. I might go there to complain tomorrow.

In happier news, I'm going out to lunch with Alexei. Sometimes I like holidays. I'll try to cram in a few more chapters of Fathers and Sons before I leave. I enjoy Turgenev's spot-on characterizations and the philosophical arguments, and I half-enjoy and half-dislike that I can spot where a translator found some awkward phrasing for some Russian expression.

Filed under: Reading

# 12 Nov 2001, 04:33PM: I went to Camille's birthday party on Saturday night, and the night before, I went to an a cappella concert on campus. More on those later.

As Leonard pointed out, saying "18th century" when you mean "19th century" is an off-by-100 error.

# 12 Nov 2001, 04:42PM: Mike Parsons told me that Steve Martin was a genius. I usually like his work, and Roger Ebert's interview with him makes me feel secure and justified.

# 12 Nov 2001, 05:39PM: Notes from the a cappella concert on Friday night:

Women can do Michael Jackson's "Beat It" as well as, or better than, Michael Jackson. At least, UCLA's Random Forces (a women's group) can.
All-women's groups tend to overuse trilling, perhaps to conceal unimpressive singing.
"People Change," which Random Forces sang, had rather typical lyrics that touched me anyway.
On the Rocks, a men's group from the University of Oregon, just shone. The men of On The Rocks are what the UC Men's Octet used to be. They made "For the Longest Time," an a cappella standard, break into new life. "Need to Know" became entertaining. They sang Guster's "Center of Attention" and I fell in love with the song instantly. They sang some lovely ditty about insomnia -- containing the nice rhyme, "I've tried everything from Aristotle/ to Dramamine and the whiskey bottle" -- and made "A Demon Cannot be Heard," a UC Golden Overtones standard, their own. Absolutely terrific voices, choreography, and arrangements. Five stars.
The Cal Jazz Choir performed excellently, as usual, although an effortlessly captivating superstar from previous years wasn't there (perhaps she graduated) and sometimes the singers scatted. Scat always bothers me. I just don't get scat. It doesn't mean anything! Am I supposed to pretend that it does? What's it for? I like words; so sue me.
The Golden Overtones (a women's group) bored me such that I began a To-Do list. [Argh, it's Monday night and I'm not halfway through. Argh.]
"Since You Been Gone" seemed lackluster. I began sleeping through the second half of every song, awakening only to applaud.
The UC Men's Octet, while not as outstanding as in previous years (gosh, it was great my sophomore year), still impressed me. I hear Paul Simon's "Kodachrome" for the first time and liked it. I'd never really listened to Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sounds of Silence" before the Men's Octet performed it, quite beautifully. (Dan once told me that, in his younger days, he'd related to the song quite personally. Now I do too.) Some reggae joke passed me by, but I loved "Paperback Writer" and the Beatles-Gang-of-Four choreography parody it contained.
I really don't listen to much contemporary music. The Men's Octet usually closes its set with some humorous revamp of a popular tune. Two years ago, it reliably brought down the house with its rendition of "Hit Me Baby One More Time." On Friday night, it did what I think of as "That One Moulin Rouge Song/Lady Marmalade" and I would have loved it more if I, you know, had heard the song more than twice or so.
The Men's Octet and Golden Overtones came out for the encore, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." Rather nice.

It was good, I imagine, the concert. I kind of wanted to go home. It was late. I didn't want to be too tired to enjoy A Prairie Home Companion the next night.

I am such a square.

# 12 Nov 2001, 05:44PM: Camille's party: Camille had a birthday and I wish her well. I attended her party and, while many interesting people joined me, the party was more conducive to dancing than to conversation. I sort of ended up in the kitchen reading the New York Times and going home early because the thumping of the music gave me a headache.

Again: I am such a square.

# 12 Nov 2001, 05:49PM GMT+5:30: I'm really glad I hung out with Alexei. He gave me some great food for thought regarding faith and religion. In addition, he sprang for lunch and I got back Bargainville and Garrison Keillor's The Book of Guys.

I was really glad to find The Book of Guys because I had been looking for it on and off for a year or more. I stopped teaching "Politics of the Midlife Crisis" about a year and a half ago, and I assumed that I must have lent it to someone in that class, and then it turned up in Alexei's bookshelf. Maybe now my luck will turn around and I'll start finding all the (material) stuff I've lost lately. Very frustrating.

Filed under: Reading

# 13 Nov 2001, 08:15AM: I'm going to catch up on Russian homework right now. Really, I am. Three or four days, all in one morning.

# 13 Nov 2001, 01:45PM: I should have known that announcements I get via the Berkeley ACLU might be kinda skewed ideologically.

Marijuana Symposium
What DARE Didn't Teach You Part 2: Marijuana
Thursday, November 15 @ 6pm
2050 Valley Life Sciences Building (aka Chan Shun Auditorium), UC Berkeley
Sponsored by Students for Sensible Drug Policy
Speakers include:
David Presti, UCB Professor who teaches "Drugs & the Brain"
Jeff Jones, Director of the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Club
Chris Conrad, Hemp Expert and Author of Hemp: Lifeline to the Future & Hemp for Health
*for more info contact Scarlett at sswerdlow@hotmail.com

I went through DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) in fifth grade and I primarily recall that I won first place in my class in the essay contest (topic: "Why I Will Never Use Drugs"). I'm rather unhappy now that I received and accepted such a simplistic attitude towards drug use. The nuances of harm reduction seem much more important to me now.

# 13 Nov 2001, 10:30PM: I wore fancy garb today to attend a luncheon for the Alumni Leadership Scholars and donors to the Alumni scholarships. How small and unaccomplished I felt next to people who have started nonprofits and published papers and been presidents of campus organizations.

(I try to comfort myself -- I studied in Russia, I've taught three courses, I'm somewhat up to speed on civil liberties and technology issues, I'm a relatively authentic person -- but see, the MC read out one or two accomplishments by each recipient, and she chose to say that I've taught "Politics in Modern Science Fiction" and "Politics of the Midlife Crisis," and people laughed.)

And then I went to Political Psychology, where the prof talked about leadership (and, incidentally, called Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program "The New Society"). He talked quite a bit. As Billy Joel said in "Shades of Grey," "The more I find out, the less that I know."

What is leadership, anyway? A motive, a means, an opportunity? Why is it important? Why should I think of it as something I want to cultivate in my life? Should I?

# 13 Nov 2001, 10:43PM: Today I again visited Jeana and helped her cook a great dinner for her coop. Today I mainly worked on the tofu for the salad, although I had a large voice in meal design.

It is so nice using a big kitchen with lots of supplies and industrial-strength equipment to prepare a well-balanced meal, and then to eat it. Spaghetti with thick mockmeat sauce, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink salad, cornbread, and chocolate pudding. Mmmmmm.

Another nice thing about living in a coop is that one gets to, while eating, socialize and/or read one of several newspapers on paper, the way God intended. When was the last time I read The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times on paper?

So I skimmed the science section of the NYT during dinner, and I stopped and burst out laughing at the article about Alan Alda starring in "QED," a play about Richard Feynman. And I kept laughing, for about five minutes, and thinking, "This is great." I'm not sure why that made me feel so blissful and terrific. Jeana thinks it was the chocolate pudding.

# 13 Nov 2001, 10:56PM: John tells me that MCSE action figures exist. Some Microsoft salesman gave them to a coworker of his. *recoil*

This came up because I was recounting to John a story from years ago, when Seth took Dan and me to a sushi place in the Metreon (which sfgate recently declared dead). Seth gave us a tour through The Microsoft Store.

Seth: They have Microsoft shirts, Microsoft pens, Microsoft mugs --
Me: Yes, it does.

# 13 Nov 2001, 11:09PM: Oh yeah, I actually did get quite a bit of Russian homework done this morning. I did not finish the ridiculously repetitive "rewrite this passage in three slightly different forms" portion, nor did I do the listening, since I don't have the audiotape. But a solid chunk nonetheless. I almost feel like a good student. Wait, no.

# 13 Nov 2001, 11:42PM: I cut myself today while removing the tough outer layers from blocks of tofu. Not nearly as dour as some medical news I could think of, but still annoying. Be careful when using sharp knives, folks. And remember to have bandages around.

# 14 Nov 2001, 08:34AM GMT+5:30: Adam linked to Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think." I've never read it, but since I posit that Google helps us achieve memex-hood, I should.

Once upon a time, Leonard impressed me by instantly recalling Bush's name when I said, apropos of nothing, the title of his famous article. Or it might have been the other way around. Either way, very hip.

Filed under: Reading

# 14 Nov 2001, 08:39AM: I dreamt a long, complicated dream last night. I participated in a snowball fight, saw Alexei in a line for a movie theater, saw my Political Psychology TA working a minimum-wage food-service job, and possibly saw and did other things I can't recall.

I wonder how much it influenced my dreams that yesterday night I played a lot with Jeana's snake, Jezebel, and finished Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Good stuff, both of those.

# 14 Nov 2001, 08:42AM GMT+5:30: Even if I move outside of Northern California after I graduate, I'll still keep reading Jon Carroll's column in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Filed under: Reading

# 14 Nov 2001, 03:47PM: I went to the Allston Way post office today and, after waiting several minutes and filling out a short form, received the $3.40 in first-class stamps that I tried to buy from a vending machine on Monday. I'm glad; I didn't expect that I'd get any recourse and/or compensation.

# 15 Nov 2001, 09:48AM GMT+5:30: George Orwell wrote in "Politics and the English Language" that

incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

I had already been considering this when I came across David Thomson's ode to Frances McDormand. His very first sentence not only ends with a needless preposition, but misuses "vale of tears" (also "vale of sorrows").

As men go through this veil of sorrows, there's a lot of things we have to adjust to.

"Veil of sorrows"? What the hell is that? Are you wearing a really sad piece of crepe over your face? Are you a Nathaniel Hawthorne character? So egregious.

Filed under: Reading

# 15 Nov 2001, 03:56PM: A week ago, whilst helping Jeana and her cooking partner prepare dinner, I was listening to a commercial radio station. Quite rare, for me. I only burst out laughing a few times. One ad for some criminal-law TV show that evening told me, "You have the motive and the opportunity...to watch!"

# 15 Nov 2001, 11:36PM: I now have the address of Mr. Berkowitz, after some rather desultory time at classmates.com. I'll send him a letter soon.

# 15 Nov 2001, 11:40PM GMT+5:30: My current fun-book is Robert Kanigel's The One Best Way, a biography of Frederick W. Taylor. An offhanded remark about transcendentalists seized me -- what's the name of the transcendentalist journal that Emerson started? Ah, yes, The Dial.

Taylor's dad gave him rather touching parental advice when Fred was off at college. It made me tear up to see a dad's letter with that heartfelt compassionate sentiment. If I ever have children, I want to honor them so much. I'm not sure I could stand it. Maybe no one is, until going through with it.

Filed under: Reading

# 15 Nov 2001, 11:52PM: I went to a showing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail today with Robin at some history students' society showing. I'd forgotten how enjoyable it is! A history professor spoke a bit before and after the film about the medieval mishmash that Monty Python put together. In addition, the prof talked about self-conscious anachronistic wackiness in King Lear, the satire wave of the thirteenth century, and his negative experience regarding Umberto Eco.

The more I hang out among history scholars, the more I wish I'd majored in history. A piece of wisdom I heard but unfortunately disregarded when I was much younger: Major in something that will give you a base of knowledge, e.g., biology, history. As it is, Sumana feels as though there's nothing I can point to and say, "That's what I learned."

# 16 Nov 2001, 12:05AM GMT+5:30: "Oh, now we see the violence inherent in the system!"

What a great movie, Holy Grail.

Before the film, Robin and I should have done reading for our classes, but instead we talked about books we'd read and books we wanted to read and recommended to each other. I haven't yet read Brothers Karamazov or Crime and Punishment, but Robin had never read Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams or Jared Silver's Guns, Germs, and Steel. How can a history major never have heard of Guns, Germs, and Steel? Don't ask me.

Robin also recommended to me Harold and Maude, a film I first saw mentioned in a list of recommended movies that Mike Parsons wrote for the Tokay Press.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Nov 2001, 12:06AM: The other night, as I waited for a campus shuttle at Bancroft and Telegraph -- as I have a hundred times -- I saw for the first time that the cement bears pawprints.

# 16 Nov 2001, 12:11AM GMT+5:30: I actually own and have sort of started Shirer's classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I bought for a buck at a thrift store next to the S-Mart Foods in Stockton. A Political Psychology discussion weeks ago reminded me of this, and of the question: Does Godwin's Law apply if one is actually discussing Nazi Germany?

The answer is, of course it does, since Godwin's Law is not actually some normative tool about winning or losing but simply an observation that, "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Usenet tradition might say, "Someone made a Nazi comparison, game over," but (unfortunately?) I can't use that excuse to walk out of my Political Psych lecture.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Nov 2001, 12:21AM: In high school, probably my junior year, I made a poster for my French class to advertise my then-favorite movie, Dave. The last lines was "Regardez-vous sur vidéo!" Only in the past month have I discovered, thanks to Alexei, that I accidentally said not "Watch it on video!" but "Watch yourself on video!"

# 16 Nov 2001, 12:38AM: Directions. My Russian class is learning about how to give directions. We're learning this for, oh, the fourth time, so we can have some fun with it.

"How do I get to the Marinskiy Theatre?"
"The Marinskiy. Well, you go down Nevskiy Prospekt..."
"Okay..."
"And then you turn left on Liteyniy ..."
"Left or right?"
"Left. And then you see a shashlik [meat kabob] store."
"A shashlik store."
"Yes. And you go into the store --"
"Do I ask the people in the store how to get to the Marinskiy?"
"No, no, they're stupid, they don't know anything. Buy a shashlik."
"But I don't eat meat."
"That's not important. Buy the shashlik and go outside. You'll see a man named Pyotr."
"Pyotr."
"Give him the shashlik. He lives on the street. He knows the city. He'll tell you how to get to the Marinskiy. I don't know anything about that."

The other pair's conversation had Jeff as very, very stupid ("The Volga? Is that a street?") and quite bewildered ("Soccer players selling matroschki dolls?" "No, no, matroschki dolls with the faces of soccer players!"). Cinzia eventually said to him, "Go down this street a little ... and ask someone else," to which he responded, "That's what the last person said."

Another example sentence, which New Yorker Sean composed, bore an eerie resemblance to lyrics from "Take the A Train."

# 16 Nov 2001, 12:53AM: You might think that "I want to find a book [so as] to read" might be literally translated, without the "so as": "Ya khochu naiyti knigu chitat'". But no. If you wish to say, in Russian, that some action is/was meant to produce some effect, you can't just use the infinitive.

The "so as" is the conjunction chtobiy. "Ya khochu naiyti knigu chtobiy chitat'." And my Russian-learning classmates and I find it tough to remember to use chtobiy. Cinzia called it "the sneaky chtobiy." I called it "The Boris and Natasha of Russian grammar."

Perhaps the best way to think of chtobiy is as the middleman who transmits intent into action. He's the the very reserved but very efficient mafioso who gets your job done. As Cinzia put it, "Chtobiy wears a tie."

Maybe we're cracking up. Today I saw that the word for "three hundred" is "tristo" and I made a "Tristan and Isolde" pun that no one got. Maybe I should have made a Thomas Pynchon reference instead.

# 16 Nov 2001, 01:10AM: From Jeana's journal:

For anyone in the Berkeley area, today (being Friday) at 4 pm, Ursula K. Le Guin will be speaking in the Morrison Room of Doe Library. The "K" in her name stands for Kroeber, 'cause her dad was Alfred Kroeber, an influential anthropologist earlier this century who has a building on campus named after him.

Of course. Alfred Kroeber. I don't know why I thought his name was Herbert. Maybe it was the Alfred Kroeber --> Ursula K. Le Guin --> another science fiction writer, Frank Herbert connection.

# 16 Nov 2001, 01:14AM: I really should go to sleep. Then again, I really should eat well-balanced meals every day and keep up on the reading for my classes and take care of other responsibilities as well.

Me on Stephen King this evening, to Robin:

"If I want to get scared, I just think about finding a job after graduation."

# 16 Nov 2001, 09:39AM GMT+5:30: I used to have all sorts of theories about the Harry Potter books. I'd talk about how the weakness of the French and the evil of the Germans had to do with World War II, and how the post-Voldemort wizard vengeance was a rather literal witch hunt reminiscent of McCarthy, and so on.

But I haven't read any Rowling recently, and a Culturebox and another, more involved analysis that I read today rather sated me for Rowling theories for a while.

Filed under: Reading

# 16 Nov 2001, 01:28PM: From Steve Hofstetter's Observational Humor:

Most colleges have huge ever-expanding libraries with hundreds of thousands of books, so they need a complex system of numbers and maps to tell you exactly which shelf your book was supposed to be on before it was misplaced.

# 16 Nov 2001, 01:34PM: Dan and other people in the OCF just found out about INTERCAL. Dan is laughing hysterically.

# 16 Nov 2001, 01:52PM: Jeff might use information on Ishi, last of the Yahi, in his linguistics dissertation. He mentioned this today in Russian class, which amused me for two reasons. First, the anthropologist whom we most associate with Ishi was Al Kroeber, whose daughter Ursula K. Le Guin I'll see at four when she speaks on campus. Second, the TA taught Jeff the word for tribes. Plemenya. Oh, shades of the summer!

# 16 Nov 2001, 09:51PM: Poor Leonard. Segfault and his weblog and Scott's and Frances's and Susanna's weblogs are offline and he doesn't know exactly why. To boot, one must use Google's cache of his front page if one has become addicted to his navbar of links to other weblogs.

And to think I thought I had problems with kuro5hin.org hosting my diary...

# 16 Nov 2001, 09:54PM: I have been thinking for quite a while about the ways in which different technologies lead people to communicate in different ways. Joel Spolsky points out that -- for example -- when a message board doesn't allow threading, offtopic posts are less likely.

# 16 Nov 2001, 10:21PM: Thanks to Jeana, I attended a lecture by Ursula K. Le Guin today and even spoke with her a tiny bit. She seemed very happy that I'd had such a great experience teaching her book. I gave her a flier that I'd used to advertise my class and that mentioned her book.

During the lecture, I thought about how very, very smart and skillful Le Guin is as a lecturer and a writer, and I grew depressed because I don't know whether I will ever be as good and successful. After the lecture, a man struck up a conversation with me based on a question I'd asked during the Q&A period. He basically told me that I seem to have teaching in my blood, and that someone who teaches even when she's not getting paid is someone who will be a successful teacher.

I can be pretty mystical sometimes. Perhaps today I heard my calling.

# 16 Nov 2001, 11:06PM: Le Guin reads Jon Carroll and called Carroll's column today a terrific example of politically aware speculative fiction.

# 17 Nov 2001, 02:35AM: Yes, it's 2:30 in the morning. I just rearranged a bunch of furniture -- and I'm not done yet -- and I still have to clean up the mess I've made. So be it. It was all worth it, because in the course of cleaning, I found my little red notebook, my driver's permit, and my Macy's gift card.

I'll probably go to sleep by 3:30.

# 17 Nov 2001, 07:50AM GMT+5:30: I did, in fact, go to bed around 3:40. I stayed up for a tiny bit reading The One Best Way. I really like Kanigel's method, though he gets repetitive in talking about young Taylor's taste for numbers and measures, and in stressing that "this was a different time, the late nineteenth century, really, remember this, you'd better remember that this was a different time when goods weren't nearly so ubiquitous and easy to make and most every manufacturing process involved craftsmanship." I sort of mind the repetition, but then again, since I'm a modern consumer and I often forget how new and unusual it is to have such abundance of disposable goods, perhaps I need the repetition.

Filed under: Reading

# 18 Nov 2001, 07:15AM:

Leonard: So I heard this joke about the situation in Afghanistan. Now that the war's basically over, the French have decided to send in troops.
Me: Ha ha ha!
Leonard: That's not the joke.
Me: Oh. But you can understand how I would think it was.
Leonard: Yeah. But the joke is that the French are going to go in and teach the Taliban surrender techniques.
Me: Ha ha ha! But wait, wouldn't that be the Italians?
Leonard: Oh, the Afghans already know all about switching sides when the tide turns.
Me: Ha ha ha!

# 18 Nov 2001, 07:02PM: 11/18, 11:18.

# 18 Nov 2001, 08:35PM: I just listened to "To the Best of Our Knowledge" on public radio. It's a bunch of interviews and stories about memory, this time. Alzheimers, the phenomenon of songs that get stuck in one's head, memory as unreliable and improvable, and nostalgia were the mini-topics.

The show ended with a bit from The Beatles' "Yesterday." Hi, John.

# 19 Nov 2001, 08:12AM: Oh, pooh, divorce lawyers are suffering since September 11th.

With all the magnanimity in the air, divorce lawyers are seeing an unmistakable drop in business. Christian Scranton, owner of Divorce Legal Services in Marin County, took a 50 percent hit in September, costing him an estimated $50,000.
"It was looking to be a stellar month, September and October are usually outstanding months," says Scranton. "Then boom. As soon as that thing happened, calls came to a screeching halt. A lot of people who were on the verge of divorce are re-evaluating their lives and trying genuinely to work on their marriages."

I can just imagine those divorce lawyers shaking their fists and muttering, Blast!

# 19 Nov 2001, 08:47AM: Leonard loved this analogy, so maybe you will, too: Giving humorists Pulitzers for their serious work (cf. Dave Barry, who received a Pulitzer for his column on his mother's suicide) is like the habit of some schools and parents in giving their wards sex education, but wrapping it in a bunch of less necessary non-sex ed. It's as though people won't believe it's a pearl if it's not in an oyster.

# 19 Nov 2001, 01:27PM: Had I time enough to read, time enough at last, one work I'd enjoy would be Harper's Weekly. I spent about an hour today at lunchtime eating Chinese food and reading the November 2001 Harper's. I enjoyed many articles and found many terrific bons mots, but the best might have been in a Pakistani schoolchild's letter to an Indian schoolchild:

I have never had any experience with an Indian my age, but recently when I downloaded ICQ, I bumped into a guy older than me, Manoj....

Most of the conversations I've ever had over ICQ have been unpleasant, if educational. I associate much more pleasant communication with e-mail, Usenet, and the Web.

# 19 Nov 2001, 01:50PM: LiveJournal seems down, presumably because of high loads. The page that told me so seemed quite sparse. Sorry, we're having problems, and to find out more go to blah blah blah. When I viewed the source, I saw this wonderful tidbit at the end:

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This garbage is to force Internet Explorer to display this page instead of
their stupid default page, which suggests you reload.
Reloading would just make the problem worse.
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# 20 Nov 2001, 09:18AM: I got an email from Angel! I'm so happy!

# 20 Nov 2001, 09:19AM: My sister's flight from San Diego to the Bay Area somewhere got canceled because of ... fog. Good to remember that sometimes air delays can come from non-human, non-malevolent sources.

# 20 Nov 2001, 09:36AM: Suzanne R. never replied to my email. Either there's some situation I don't know about that's preventing her from doing so, or she didn't change that much since I knew her.

I sent Mr. Berkowitz a letter.

# 20 Nov 2001, 01:09PM: I actually did a bit of productive work today, going to the Psychology/Education liberry and picking up a load of text regarding persuasion. I finally decided to stop trying to roll my own topic for the Political Psych paper, and so here I am in the thick of it. Ten pages in nine days. Ergh. I still have yet to pick up some stuff from the Business/Econ library (shiver) and the main stacks.

# 20 Nov 2001, 01:10PM: Brunching Shuttlecocks does it again! Quatre étoiles!

# 20 Nov 2001, 01:28PM: I've been listening to Dar Williams's album Mortal City, which Seth gave me. There's a certain passage in "Iowa" that I've been humming to myself recently:

So I asked a friend about it on a bad day, her husband had just
Left her, and she sat down in the chair he left behind
She said, "What is love, where did it get me?
Whoever thought of love is no friend of mine."

I don't feel that despairing these days, and I'm glad. I hope I'm only humming it because I like the music.

# 20 Nov 2001, 01:37PM: "The case has alarmed First Amendment experts, who believe Dalton is the first person in the United States successfully prosecuted for child pornography that involved writings, not images."

Call me crazy, but I believe that if a particular creative work does not harm anyone, either in its making or in its effects on those who experience it, then maybe, just maybe, it shouldn't be illegal. If I use crayons on paper to make a picture of youngish-looking people engaging in sex, completely out of my own head -- and I'm pretty sure I've never viewed child porn -- and keep it to myself, then that shouldn't be illegal. Nor if I wrote a story about it, nor if I made realistic-looking portrayals using graphics software. The GIMP is not the PIMP; "it might someday indirectly lead to molestation" is not sufficient cause for arrest.

# 20 Nov 2001, 01:42PM: You might think that http://www.salon.com/people/bc/ could be a shortcut to Salon's "Brilliant Careers" archive. But no, it's a three-year-old post-election pre-impeachment cackle.

# 20 Nov 2001, 01:58PM: In Russian class the other day I navigated on a map of St. Petersburg from Vasilevskiy Ostrov to Gostiniy Dvor. Pretty much the only thing I ever did on Vasilevskiy Ostrov was visit the "Open Your Windows!" open-air rock concert, during which I heard Chaif play and met some friendly people. Don't get me started (let me tell you!) re: Gostiniy Dvor. DLT was much better. I wish I'd found it before the last week I was there.

# 20 Nov 2001, 06:56PM GMT+5:30: I'm reading a heck of a lot on persuasion for my paper in political psychology. Peter Wright, summarizing an experiment in "Cognitive Responses to Mass Media Advocacy":

Adult women were presented either anaudio or print version of the text of an ad for a soybean-based food innovation....All the women were asked to treat the entire transmission segment as they naturally would in responding to mass media transmissions in their home. Half were also told that the upcoming ad would discuss a topic about which they must soon make a personal decision. This heightened the amount of attention given the ad versus the other message, as shown by reliable differences on a postmessage question.

To paraphrase Phoebe on the television show Friends, you must decide, you must decide, even though it's just an experiment, you must decide!

Filed under: Reading

# 20 Nov 2001, 10:33PM: This past weekend, I thought a heck of a lot about birth and death. Today, my mother told me that a guy I knew in high school, Avi Raina, died yesterday. I met him many times. Our families were friends. The last time I saw him we were praying together a few months ago. He was a senior in college studying economics. He won lots of speech and debate awards. He was twenty-two years old, younger than many of my friends. He died of a long illness, cancer of the lymph nodes, and my mom and his family prayed together that he would recover, but yesterday he died, someone I knew, and I never really knew him, and now I'll never have the chance.

When I checked my email just now, I found out that a couple that John knows is going to have a child.

Would I be ready to have a child? Creating the future: how could I have a more important job? How rewarding, how fulfilling, how honorable!

But I would have to accept the possibility of experiencing what the Raina family just did. Is anyone ever ready for that?

# 20 Nov 2001, 10:45PM: From an InPassing.org entry:

"Some engineer worked for years alone in a lab making circuit diagrams and signal flow graphs to make this sound card. And then some guy from Haas [the UC Berkeley business school] comes along and names it the 'Ultra Super Viper Pro 3800x."

# 20 Nov 2001, 10:57PM: It's almost 11pm. I should turn in as I have a busy day tomorrow: handball, Russian, Russian history, research in the Business/Econ and main libraries, and television-socializing in the evening. So many of my friends have already left for Thanksgiving holidays; I already miss Jeana, for example.

This mundane, "to-do list" entry does not rise to my usual standards but (to launch into another weblog trope, the 'whine') I'm low on cash, I'm tired, my place is a mess, I didn't accomplish most of what I wanted to do tonight (cleaning and Russian), I do not anticipate great happiness in my Thanksgiving "holiday," I have to write a ten-page paper by next Thursday, I need to get cracking on my work-research, I've barely seen most of my friends this week, I'm behind in all my reading, and I'm saddled with this sense of maturity and mortality that's worse than melancholy, just a burden of death that I'm too busy to examine.

Maybe I'll feel better if I can just do some Russian exercises for tomorrow. Keep a constructive momentum going.

# 21 Nov 2001, 12:33PM: Wow, I usually make my first entry of the day earlier than this.

Russian class always holds some amusing tidbit. Today I realized that "Sumana" -- with the accents mangled -- turns into "out of head on." That is to say, the first two syllables of my first name are an idiom for "crazy."

In addition, when a group of people should be doing something together but falter (as my group often does when trying to pronounce new vocabulary in a single voice), one idiomatic rebuke is "Who's in the forest, who's picking wood?"

Last for the week: In Russian, it means nothing to say, "Behave yourself!" One must add the adverb "well" or "poorly" for such an imperative to make any sense.

# 22 Nov 2001, 10:26AM: I think I've only ever felt rather fond of one US holiday, and that's Thanksgiving. Fourth of July -- too jingoistic. Christmas -- too hyped, commercial, and sentimental. Valentine's Day -- too hyped, commercial, sentimental, and contributes to a narrow, anxious, immature, overhyped view of romantic love. New Year's I've always considered part of Christmas, and people around me never seem to be in the retrospective mood I try to assume in the last few days of the year. I'd like Labor Day and May Day if I knew about associated relevant activities and traditions I could cheer. Mothers' Day, Fathers' Day, et al., I see as rather low in the fun-to-obligation ratio. I neither commit nor experience clever pranks on most April's Fool Days.

But I like the sanitized, dehistoricized meaning of Thanksgiving. I like thinking about things for which I should be grateful.

But today I experience my first Thanksgiving as an agnostic, which poses particularly new problems: whom should I thank? What does it mean to try to stay in a state of gratefulness when many of the things for which I'd like to thank someone who could appreciate it didn't really happen because of anyone's act of will?

Perhaps I can view this as an opportunity. I'll trace causality -- if I can -- and thank people and places and historical forces, and try to achieve awe at the vast banyan trees of contingency.

# 22 Nov 2001, 03:06PM: Leonard wishes that Phil Zimbardo hosted a talk show, possibly entitled Zimbarded! I think that Zimbardo's mix of camera-hogging, suave charm, and psychological expertise make him perfect for late-night. Don't you?

In other news, I forgot to attend Anirvan's/Bookfinder's party on Sunday night, and apologized to him yesterday. He's cool about it. I'll visit the company soon, before it moves.

# 22 Nov 2001, 03:10PM: I just did a load of laundry. (When did people start saying that and stop saying "I washed a load of clothes"? Perhaps gradually, as the human became more and more removed from the process.)

For the first time since early August, I am shod in the tapochki (slippers) that my Russian host mother, Vera, gave to me. I had worn them throughout my stay, so the soles had two layers (one cloth and one cat hair), and I just washed them, and yay. These are the first knit slippers I've had since my old neighbor in Pennsylvania, Mrs. Rogers, gave my family at least one pair of pink booties. I think my sister took them.

# 22 Nov 2001, 11:20PM GMT+5:30: Mixed-up bookshelves: at one Thanksgiving shindig I attended today, I saw Moby Dick next to The Illustrated Adventures of Sherlock Holmes next to The Days Are Just Packed!

I got through half of the Watterston before a family member came and bugged me to socialize.

Filed under: Reading

# 22 Nov 2001, 11:24PM GMT+5:30: I used to read a Calvin and Hobbes every day, off calvinandhobbes.com. But that habit lapsed, and today I read some Watterston for the first time in months (not counting the strips that I see next to Bizarro and Dilbert and the like pasted to office doors at the U). At first, Calvin sounded a lot like Leonard, but then I got to visualizing him more as me. I didn't particularly see any resemblance between Hobbes and anyone in my life. My better self, maybe.

Filed under: Reading

# 23 Nov 2001, 03:21PM: Mary Kay, entrepreneur encourager and cosmetics queen, has died. I imagine Frances already knows that.

When I break the Buy Nothing Day tradition, I do it big. My purchases today included business garb (for interviews and for actual workplaces), boots, Martinelli's cider, chocolate, and a yam. Much savings was had on all.

My parents support a teaching career wholeheartedly. They have both taught and consider it an honorable profession. Now I just have to decide if I want to pursue such a career, and, if so, how.

I will probably get to see Angel today! I'm really glad.

# 23 Nov 2001, 03:39PM: Goodness, Slate gets slower and slower with every redesign.

A woman outside a supermarket (ostensibly collecting money for charity) asked me what language(s) I speak, probably to derive my ethnic origin. "English and Russian" threw her off and I had to explain that I am not actually Russian. Never did get around to telling her I'm Indian.

# 23 Nov 2001, 03:52PM: From a Slashdot comment: "Thanksgiving is really about little kids and olives... Ok, big kids too, but mostly olives." I love olives.

# 23 Nov 2001, 09:55PM: Angel came over and we gabbed, gabbed, gabbed.

If Dia de los Muertos is the Day of the Dead, Dios de los Muertos would be the God of the Dead (as Angel corrected my ignorant-California-resident Spanish), implying that the dead have a separate God, which

would imply big theological ... stuff
reminds me of Leonard's song about letters from the dead
could be really cool, perhaps as a premise for a short story that I will probably never write.

# 23 Nov 2001, 10:00PM: I wish my dad were more considerate.

# 23 Nov 2001, 10:02PM: What's this? Cal won a football game? Oh, darn, I was hoping for an 0-and-n season to commemorate my senior year.

# 24 Nov 2001, 10:36AM: Aaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgghhh!!!

# 24 Nov 2001, 03:21PM: Not quite as much aaaaaaarrrrrgh &tc.

# 24 Nov 2001, 06:01PM: I'm back home, in Berkeley, and listening to A Prairie Home Companion. Hooray!

# 25 Nov 2001, 07:23AM: Feminists maintained for years that women are the canaries in the mineshaft when it comes to human rights.

The cluster bombs that the US dropped in Afghanistan -- the bombs that inevitably turn into mines -- were bright canary yellow.

# 25 Nov 2001, 07:26AM: While in Stockton, I saw a Carl's Jr fast-food restaurant or two. What does it mean when a Carl's Jr franchise flies a Carl's Jr. flag at half-mast?

# 26 Nov 2001, 07:05AM: Tom Tomorrow: "If you don't collect 'em all -- then the terrorists have already won!"

# 26 Nov 2001, 07:34AM: Leonard and I conversed a great deal yesterday and we probably had around five "arguments," if you could call them that. We weren't angry at each other, so it's not right to use "argument" in the informal sense, but we didn't have any rules set up regarding how long each person could speak, so my high-school-forensics self rebels at calling them "debates."

We talked about some pro-life argument, and what would be different if humans laid eggs instead of giving live birth, and I don't know what all else -- we generally grumble about Salon.com -- and something Steve said about reluctance to see "a movie made to sell toys." And I really admire Leonard's excellent talent in making strong arguments, and in finding the strengths and weaknesses in his and others' arguments.

The thing is -- and in a way this is just a restatement in personal terms of something Randy Waterhouse says in Cryptonomicon -- nitpickiness is a two-way street. I don't like to whine about the quality of a meal or the imprecision of a friend's speech. Just this weekend my parents said to me that finding fault is easy, but looking for the good things makes life better. And yet, if I were to try to write code that a computer could understand, or cogently criticize and argument, I would have to be nitpicky. Trying to be laid-back is all well and good in direct interactions with other people, but actual criticism requires judgment and intense focus and unabashed nitpickness. Which is tough for me.

I'm not sure whether a person is nitpicky or can perform a function of nitpickiness. Can a person turn it on and off? Perhaps a person sort of has an underlying tendency against or towards nitpickiness, and can try to fight it. I sure hope it's like that.

# 26 Nov 2001, 11:38AM: It is so, so, so hard to try to live the examined life.

I tend to believe that if a lifestyle isn't demanding and painful, it isn't worthwhile. So maybe, now that I know it hurts to give up faith, and that it's okay that it hurts, maybe I can do it.

# 26 Nov 2001, 03:27PM: I'm going to the gym in just a moment, really I am. I worked on my paper some this morning, skipping handball and Russian (horror!), and then had a very enjoyable lunch with my sister. She helped/made me articulate some arguments I'll use in my paper. Have I mentioned I have a paper due Thursday? I'm going to analyze various proposals which seek to regulate or remove sex and violence in TV and films, and/or to remove or regulate ads for alcohol and tobacco. While talking to Nandini, I articulated the (as always, obvious in hindsight) argument that these proposals seek to attack various parts of the message-reception/persuasion process (e.g., exposure, source credibility, uncontested message).

Russian history lecture: fun! As we approach the end of the semester, we also approach the Russian Revolutions, which makes me feel as though I should hear peppy music, e.g., "Y'all Ready For This," at the end of each lecture.

Russian history amuses and fascinates me. A giant gap emerged, by the beginning of this century, between an ancient monarchical government and a huge, century-old radical movement with this elaborate and ultra-intellectual ideology. I really like tracing those developments.

Really, I'm going to practice my handball now (aiee!) and then go home and work on that paper.

# 26 Nov 2001, 03:33PM: Kuro5hin.org went down a few weeks ago and has not yet recovered. While I certainly find myself heartened that I now host my weblog on a more reliable site, I will try to take the first opportunity (when K5 comes back up) to archive all my old K5 entries here. Right now I only have the last few months' worth archived here.

The Daily Californian wants columnists for next semester. I'll probably edit a few weblog entries into the three sample columns and apply, apply for the third or fourth time as a student here. Perhaps the Daily Cal will favorably note my status as a senior in my last semester. I've hoped that for years.

# 26 Nov 2001, 03:41PM: Adam agrees with me (and with Leonard): Phil Zimbardo "would make a good late-night talk show host." The emerging consensus astounds me! Finally, a {president, late-night talk show host} we all can agree on!

# 26 Nov 2001, 03:42PM: Off to the handball courts. Rah rah rah.

# 26 Nov 2001, 05:15PM: I am trying and trying to learn to swallow my pride. The universe does not care about me, but some other people do. A difficult mix to master.

# 26 Nov 2001, 05:22PM: Things I should be thinking about: my paper. Things I am thinking about: humanism, humility, love, logic, meditation, menstruation, food, topics for columns for my Daily Cal application, the most painful sorrow imaginable, and my paper.

# 26 Nov 2001, 05:26PM: I read a really heartening Associated Press item over the weekend: Turkey's legislature just passed some really sweeping law revisions recognizing various women's rights. Hurrah!

# 26 Nov 2001, 09:01PM GMT+5:30: I just conversed with my sister and lent her: One-L by Scott Turow, Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress, Waiting by Ha Jin, and a book of graphic --that is, comic-book style-- retellings of various fairy tales. The first two I bought at garage sales or used book stores. The third I bought new, or Dan bought for me, at Moe's or Cody's on Telegraph. The fourth I received as a gift for my birthday in 2000 from a couple that has since broken up.

I'm listening to You Will Go to the Moon by Moxy Früvous on a disc what Steve gave me. Thanks, Steve.

Speaking of books [disingenuous segue]: Leonard and I browsed at Pegasus yesterday. We saw a book entitled The Maths Gene. (As many of you, my fair readers, already know, "maths" is a British abbreviation for "mathematics," as strange to US-dwellers as "math" is to UK residents.) Leonard remarked that we must be seeing the British version of the book, since the version for export to the US would have an altered title. I said, "Yeah, The Maths Gene and the Sorcerer's Stone."

Filed under: Reading

# 27 Nov 2001, 09:57AM: I really wanna go but I know I shouldn't. Also, I shouldn't even be on the net right now. Also, I'm sick.

# 27 Nov 2001, 12:19PM: A professor here whose classes I really enjoyed, who was so smart, so thought-provoking, so accessible to students, so penetrating, so willing to admit when he was wrong, has died. I just got an email from the political science advisors saying that Michael Rogin died over the Thanksgiving holidays, while in Paris.

I didn't know him that well, but I took two classes with him. What a dynamite lecturer he was -- fifty insights every hour, exhilirating and cogent. He sponsored one of the classes I taught. He took practically half a semester off a year ago to have and recover from heart surgery, but now he's dead. Brilliant man. I've cried and I probably will again.

He's left a lot behind. Thousands of students took note of things he said. He made me think. I miss him already.

# 27 Nov 2001, 12:35PM: Professor Rogin wrote many articles and books. One can read some of them online. Right now I'm reading "Mon Pays" (My Country), a book review. I can hear his voice in my head when I read his words.

He used to put up huge, elaborate, detailed outlines on the chalkboard before he lectured. He'd try to follow them, but sometimes he'd stray into interesting tangents and trivia and coincidences and connections. His graduate students used to laugh about his habit of placing one hand on top of his head as he lectured, as though he had to keep all the information from bursting out of his brain at once.

Sometimes I thought he was pulling one over on us, trying to make an argument out of coincidence, especially in the media-studies realm. But I tried to never miss his lectures, and especially in his American Political Theory class, in every lecture he made many important connections that helped me learn where modern political ideologies originated.

He would have taught American Political Theory next semester.

Once he said "Sinclair Lewis" when he meant "Upton Sinclair." I corrected him in private and he announced the correction -- and that I had made it! -- in the next lecture, in front of hundreds of people.

Several lectures later, in a Q&A session, he corrected my pronunciation of "effete," and joked that we were now even.

I really think that he was a seeker of truth, and it's a sad thing that he has died, because humanity can use all the truth-seekers it can get.

# 27 Nov 2001, 02:19PM: I went to Russia. Dan didn't understand. But now, it seems, he plans on going to China after graduation, to study kung fu. I wonder if I influenced him at all. I probably can't ask him.

# 27 Nov 2001, 02:38PM: Paul Ford, a New York-based writer, wrote in 1999 of "[t]he last thing I consider, the thing spinning all night in my head, looming over me like the World Trade Center".

Off to Heller Lounge to skim my readers for paper-worthy material.

# 27 Nov 2001, 04:38PM: First they came for the "suspected terrorists," and I said nothing...

# 28 Nov 2001, 09:08AM: Very, very soon, my cell phone will be inoperative. This is my choice. I didn't want a cell phone in the first place, and even though I got used to it and liked the convenience, soon I will no longer have it, and I will feel freer.

# 28 Nov 2001, 10:07AM: I have no idea how my readers feel about my recent low posting frequency. But it will probably be like this until tomorrow at 2 or so when I turn in this huge paper. I'm probably skipping the majority of my classes today to work on it. I hate Russian class anyway. The teacher is impatient. I might reward myself with Russian History lecture and/or that SANE meeting if I get a lot of work done, though. But no way will I get to see West Wing or Enterprise. Oh well. Back to the grind.

# 28 Nov 2001, 12:07PM GMT+5:30: Lane, W. Ronald, and Thomas Russell. Advertising: A Framework. p. 265. The word "slogan" comes from the Gaelic, slugh gairm, for "battle cry."

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Nov 2001, 12:13PM GMT+5:30: I should have known that some book entitled In Defense of Advertising: arguments from reason, ethical egoism, and laissez-faire capitalism would revolt me. But the copyright acknowledgments page contains eight items, three of them by Ayn Rand! Aieee!

It gets better. The preface starts out talking about ads that the author, one Jerry Kirkpatrick, once disliked, until he learned more about advertising and now he believes that the ads "all meet the standards of both good advertising and good taste." Well, Mr. Kirkpatrick, if you reacted negatively to the ads -- and, by association, to the products they advertised -- then they were bad advertisements, weren't they? Jeez.

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Nov 2001, 12:26PM GMT+5:30: The In Defense of Advertising book had nothing I could use, I discovered rather quickly. (No index entries for "children," "minors," "protection," "sex," or "violence.") But our Objectivist friend Mr. Kirkpatrick married a woman named Linda Reardan. Ayn Rand named one protagonist of Atlas Shrugged Hank Rearden. I don't mean to imply anything so much as call it an amusing coincidence. I certainly would never imply that Objectivists are such slavish devotees to Miss Rand that they'll make major life choices based on the details of her fiction.

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Nov 2001, 12:26PM: Oi, 12:30 already. But my stack of to-skim books has shortened slightly.

# 28 Nov 2001, 01:20PM: My pile of books to skim is now smaller than the pile of books I've already gleaned for useful information. Hurrah!

A telemarketer just called, and even though I had to say "hello?" eight times before he spoke, and I found it difficult to understand him, and he followed the script that told him to counter my "thank you, I'm not interested" twice, I still remained extremely courteous all the way to the end. I even let him hang up first. Little things like that make me feel great.

# 28 Nov 2001, 01:31PM: Okay. Off to Russian History Lecture, and then more work -- a good outline? The beginnings of a draft? -- and then the SANE meeting, and then home and more work and probably skipping Russian again tomorrow, but dammit, I'll attend Political Psych section at 12:30, if only to surprise the TA, who is one of the snarkiest people I've ever met.

# 28 Nov 2001, 09:30PM GMT+5:30: "There are many different philosophical positions on what it means to be ethical and what morality means (Frankena, 1973)."

Thank you, Richard M. Perloff and Mr. or Ms. Frankena.

Filed under: Reading

# 28 Nov 2001, 11:57PM GMT+5:30: I took a break from writing my paper -- at this rate it'll be done in May or so -- to try to finish off my thoughts on something that happened today.

I gave in a bit to temptation this evening. On my way home, I stopped at Barnes & Noble's. I could rationalize it as "waiting for the rain to stop," but that's not why. I saw in the B&N window an ad: Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, will speak about his new book (God's Debris: A Thought Experiment) on 6 December at the Berkeley Barnes & Noble's at Shattuck and Durant. So I stopped in and found the book and skimmed it all the way through. It took me about thirty minutes to read about a hundred pages. I found it useful, but not terrific.

Adams uses the hoary old Socratic-dialogue framing device, which creates some problems. First, our protagonist-questioner doesn't ask some questions or make some counterarguments that I'd like, and the maddening "all-knowing wisdom" of the Old Man goes unquestioned. But -- second -- Adams can deflect criticism of the flawed arguments that his characters make, saying that the book is only a work of fiction, not a philosophical tract and not necessarily representative of his own thoughts.

In addition, Adams can hide behind his subtitle, excusing himself with "it's only a thought-experiment." A thought experiment should contain provocative, well-thought-out questions. God's Debris certainly contains some of those, but there's very little there that strikes me as new. Free will, God, yawn. Adams entertains with his writing style, and makes the questions more palatable for a mainstream audience, but I've asked myself these questions already, so they don't shock me.

In the first third or so, Adams -- excuse me, the Old Man -- tears down the naive reader's worldview. In the second part, he builds an elaborate and (to me) questionable cosmology involving God and probability. In the third, he gives the questioner advice on how to live happily.

The third part is the best.

I found the advice generally useful (except for the "inherent gender differences" parts), so certainly one wonders whether that implies that its basis is valid. Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, which is just another way of saying "be careful of reckless correlation." One does not need to believe the advice-giver's philosophy to recognize good advice. Recognize the probable and act accordingly, the Old Man says, and I agree. As a final note, I must remark upon the Scott Adams media empire and how its existence colors my view of any artifact emerging from it. Mr. Adams has Big Ideas and spreads them quite effectively via his books, e-mail list, comic strips, and other media. I urge caution of Scott Adams's unabashed memery. I sense some large, frightening plan in the offing, and I would rather not be one of his minions.

Filed under: Reading

# 29 Nov 2001, 02:16AM: The wheels of writing my goddamn paper turn exceeding slow.

# 29 Nov 2001, 02:17AM: How is it that I went so long without investigating Modern Humorist's hilarious poetry parodies?

# 29 Nov 2001, 03:03AM: Oh, wow, I forgot that 3am here is 6am on the East Coast and therefore Morning Edition just came on.

My back really hurts. Once I reach my seven-page goal, I'll reward myself with a hot shower and some sleep.

# 29 Nov 2001, 07:56AM GMT+5:30: There's this great photo in Bob Woodward's The Choice (his book on the 1996 US presidential election). Colin Powell is speaking at some press conference with downcast eyes and, on the right, a woman, presumably his wife, is crying. The caption goes something like, "Colin Powell announced in a press conference on February 31, 1996, that he would not run for President. He also revealed that he is a Republican."

The way the photo and caption go together, the woman seems to be weeping, and Powell ashamed, because he has just outed himself as a Republican. Quite funny.

Filed under: Reading

# 29 Nov 2001, 09:06AM: "Sex, Guns, and Cigarettes." That is possibly the least imaginative title I've ever devised for a paper. But I'm caffeinated and (it almost seems too obvious to say) low on sleep.

Thanks, San Francisco, for sending your rain over here. Sure, it's all right for all you officeworkers who can just stay inside all day, but I have to walk around in it. I'd rather be sleeping or reading The One Best Way or even catching up on Russian. Argh.

Well, back to work. Now that I've lowered my expectations, I'm doing surprisingly okay.

# 29 Nov 2001, 04:01PM: I finished my paper, it's done, I took a Russian test that seemed quite easy (a trap! a trap, they screamed), I ate, I went to class, I heard riotously funny anecdotes, my professor told stories in a manner so Keilloresque it woke me up, and now I'm tired but still sugar-adrenaline-caffeinated. I'm going to a free dinner tonight during which students and political science professors will compete in a trivia game. This reminds me of an out-of-left-field Gideon v. Wainwright reference in Russian History a few weeks ago. But no matter.

# 30 Nov 2001, 10:16AM GMT+5:30: Argh, argh, argh. Scott Adams got me! I mocked the imperfect questioner and questioned the Socrates character, and now I find out that this Daily Cal reviewer got the point, and I didn't. Adams was, it seems, deliberately playing with the form of the Socratic dialogue, challenging the reader to herself question the traditionally infallible Socrates character and "think for herself." Cyrus Farivar writes,

Adams twists an ancient tradition of passive Socratic questioning by inviting the reader to directly question the paradox that Avatar is omniscient though he speaks in false syllogisms.

No wonder he had so many fallacious arguments -- that was Adams's intention. Great. I feel had. I shouldn't, but I do.

Filed under: Reading

# 30 Nov 2001, 10:48AM: Adam and I were writing papers at the same time:

I think I'm getting delirious. Already. I'm making up sources that don't actually exist and then desperately trying to find them on Lexis-Nexis.

# 30 Nov 2001, 10:58AM: I may have actually broken some unimportant anatomical item whilst laughing with Leonard over the oeuvre of Paul Conrad, the man who takes the editorial cartooning genre to new extra-dimensional extremes. Kris introduced us to Conrad's bizarre style and commented on it better than I probably could. I found some of them (example and another) like a mental Magic Eye, but probably Mr. Conrad doesn't intend for them to be as such.

Note that the ultimate Paul Conrad cartoon is a cloud of cloned anthrax bacteria spelling out "I [heart] NY."

Osama bin Muppet (credit Leonard for witticism).

What a cute elephant!

A not-so-cute elephant.

I think I understand now why people appreciate Pokey the Penguin.

# 30 Nov 2001, 12:28PM: Is this the all-time bizarrest Paul Conrad? Or this one? Or yet another?

This is just too fun.

# 30 Nov 2001, 12:38PM: Paul Conrad has won three Pulitzers. I weep for journalism.

You know, somehow Jim Borgman finds the time to draw Zits every day and draw political cartoons that are, unlike Conrad's work, reliably political cartoons (and not, say, illustrations masquerading as political commentary).

# 30 Nov 2001, 12:54PM: The end of this FAQ gives a lot away.

# 30 Nov 2001, 01:08PM: Last night I attended the Undergraduate Political Science Association trivia game. Two undergraduate students and two graduate students answered trivia questions on politics and on pop culture. A diverting event, even if I couldn't tell the contestants apart.

Contestant: Latin American Politics.
Announcer: Which ruler of Chile did President Nixon help out --
Contestant: Pinochet.
Announcer: No, that's not it. What ruler of Chile did President Nixon help out in the 1970s? [pause, squint] Oh, wait. Which ruler of Chile did President Nixon help oust in the --
Contestant: Allende.
Announcer: Correct!
Audience: such comments as "that's a pretty important difference."

# 30 Nov 2001, 03:55PM: Bem, ranting on how his professor reacted to a query: "Not only that, he's wrong."

# 30 Nov 2001, 03:58PM: It's a week like this that makes me wish I were going to a concert tonight. But I'm going to see Ghost World instead, thanks to the special Friday night movie showings that SUPERB puts on at Wheeler Auditorium. It has Steve Buscemi. *shrug*

# 30 Nov 2001, 11:19PM: Wow, a Friday night alone and decisions on a whim. I wrote some emails and surfed the web in the OCF, ate a burger and read more of The One Best Way at Smart Alec's, went to Ghost World (very small crowd), enjoyed it (very indie, huge emphasis on characterization), hung out with a fella I met there named Ethan, and went home.

Ethan, a Seattlite, did not know the joke about the Texan, the Californian, and the Seattlite who walk into a bar. Shock and horror!

But Ethan, it turns out, does know Ken Shields, who lives with Dan, whom I know from living next door to him in Freeborn Hall my freshman year at Cal. Ken also served as an unknowing point of contact between Shweta and me, after Shweta and I met via Nathaniel, whom I met by starting up a conversation with him in the humor section of the ASUC general bookstore.

Ethan noted that, if I'm making some bid to be remembered after I die, my best bet might be to get mummified. He has a point.