# 01 Mar 2002, 07:20AM GMT+5:30: It's not often that I wonder, "How should I address this professor? Would he rather I use his title, his title and last name, or his first name?" and then read a book by him (in this case, John McWhorter's Losing the Race) that answers the question (in this case, "John").
# 02 Mar 2002, 08:18AM:
My roommate's alarm clock has gone off and is playing Belle and
Sebastian's fold your hands child, you walk like a peasant.
Quite agreeable.
Yesterday was a strange and uncomfortable day in some respects. In
my Russian class, even though we discuss interesting topics, I lose
interest very easily; my proficiency has fallen far below its level
back when I was in Russia, and most of my classmates are fluent people
I haven't met before. I miss the tight-knit Russian classes I used to have,
with populations more like four and less like fifteen.
Yesterday we talked gun control. I was the only person to argue anything
like an opposing view. Yes, I am unhappy with the state of gun safety,
and I think that no one needs cop-killer bullets, and I'm very
sympathetic to the pro-gun-control view because I dislike violence
and weapons and killing and so on. But criminals will always find
ways to get guns, and so the government needs guns to protect the
citizens, and the citizens need guns in case the government turns
tyrannical. Why do people resist this simple fact? "I trust the
government, I think our government is good," people in my class said.
I can't be that blithe.
The other thing is that I was trying to adjust a big map that sat on
a tripod on my Music class yesterday and it fell on me in front of
everyone. Not as embarrassing as getting booed by and in front of 2,700 people (which happened to me in high school), but pretty funny.
# 02 Mar 2002, 08:30AM: On the other hand, yesterday I had a real and enjoyable conversation with Dan and found out some of what's going on in his life. I wonder whether he would have asked about me if I hadn't had to dash. I can finally see, now, what he is instead of what he was to me. I'm a sucker for curious small satifsfactions. If my life were a movie, it would be pretty indie.
# 02 Mar 2002, 04:25PM:
Zack and I hung out today. I had only been to Bacheeso's, a nice breakfast place at Dwight and San Pablo, once before, and I'd never visited Fourth Street (you think your downtown is gentrified?) before. Note to Adam: when Zack saw musicians playing in front of Peet's, he said, "they're busking." At the time, I was toting a bag from Sur La Table, where I considered purchasing a grapefruit spoon.
Zack told me an interesting tale at breakfast. I noticed that the Bacheeso's wall mural is nice, not too Commie-looking (contrast many other Berkeley murals). In response, Zack told me about a WPA-style project that happened during the Great Depression. The government wanted to provide employment for good writers, and wanted to use their writing skills. But many of them were leftists, and the government was afraid that they would produce Communist literature. The answer? Travel guides! The government employed many writers to produce excellent travel guides to various parts of the United States, guides some of which are still useful almost a century later.
# 02 Mar 2002, 04:29PM: I nearly burst into tears when I saw a headline this morning about the recent Hindu/Muslim violence in India. Even now I can barely form any thought beyond "my people."
# 04 Mar 2002, 12:31AM: March 8 will be International Women's Day. In Russia. Custom: men give flowers to pretty much all the women they know. Aside from the floracide, pretty cool.
# 04 Mar 2002, 12:39AM: From Mickey Kaus's latest Series-Skipper: "[Condoleeza] Rice says the problems of Afghanistan are so complex, 'We're going to wish this was the Balkans.'"
# 04 Mar 2002, 12:52AM GMT+5:30:
From Adam: "Snapple says it's 'made from the best stuff on earth.'
Evidently the best stuff on earth is ... water and high-fructose corn
syrup."
I hung out with Matt and Adam last night, er, Saturday night, and Leonard today. The socializing! The fun! Now I've seen two episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus and one of Muppets Tonight. The crotchety critics in the Muppet cast are basically Beavis and Butthead.
Yesterday and today I reread Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, which has a few lines as disorienting as "Somebody's got to do it....I'm free, white, and twenty-one...this is a free country and I'm free and independent. I do as I please."
For my weekly chore, I cleaned the kitchen floor. I really scrubbed some spots that hadn't gotten enough attention from previous floor-cleaners. Camilla told me to stop and said that I reminded her of Cinderella.
# 04 Mar 2002, 12:55AM: I think I'm done with my Logic homework due Friday, and I've started my Linguistics problem set way ahead of time, too. I'm learning syntax by diagramming sentences, an exercise I thought I'd finished about ten years ago. I may be better at relative clauses than most, thanks to kotoriy (the "which/that" of Russian), but it's still bothersome to do these trees.
# 04 Mar 2002, 01:07AM:
On Zack's "I
need a bigger dishrack" of 3 March:
Kitchenware? Food laundry?
You could take some of your dishes &tc. out of commission -- bench
them so you have to do the dishes more often. I've done that here. Most
of my dishes, utensils, and cookware are in inaccessible cabinets. People
try to do the dishes often anyway, especially since the rule is "do your
own dishes," with the benevolent corollary of "you can leave your dishes
for later once in a while, as long as you just as often do other people's
dishes that they don't do immediately."
# 04 Mar 2002, 11:28AM: From Logic discussion, on the sentence "For all x, if x is a basketball player, then x is large": "Now suppose we pick Jerry Rice for x. [pause] Football player."
# 04 Mar 2002, 11:30AM: My Russian prof tries to involve the class in all sorts of curriculum decisions. As Josh Brockman once wrote, "I'm tired of all this empowerment."
# 04 Mar 2002, 12:22PM:
So I saw Forty Days and Forty Nights (sparse IMDB listing) on Thursday night. Blech! I'm glad I saw it for free. I wonder if I'd rationalize its flaws away if I'd paid money to see it. Good thing I wouldn't do that. Now that I don't hang out with movie addicts, I'm like the fella in the Onion story who, at the age of thirty, can't stand camp anymore and only wants to read and listen to and watch media experiences that are actually good.
But back to the review.
As the SF Chronicle astutely noted, the first half was okay, even funny. But as the "plot" progressed, I tired of the gimmick, of the stars, of the costars, of everything.
I disliked EVERYONE in this film! The lead characters wasted all their political capital with me by acting like idiots. I know, it's a romantic comedy, I should expect some foibles, but I wince at the rampant anti-communication doctrine of these jokers. The lead, Josh Hartnett -- aside from looking a bit like Leonard ("lantern-jawed"?), little to recommend him. The female -- I liked her until I found out her occupation. She helps populate the blocked-URLs list for Internet blocking software! We're supposed to LIKE that she works for a censorship firm? (As Leonard pointed out, I'm not exactly the target audience.) And every supporting character was gratuitously annoying to the point of evil.
In all fairness, the movie has some pretty shots of San Francisco, and I actually liked the dot-com settings (what can I say, I'm sentimental). Still -- watch Gosford Park or The Muppets Take Manhattan instead. And, in general, avoid movies with titles of the type "N [time-periods] [conjunction] N' [time-periods]".
Oh, and the great thing about watching Forty Days and Forty Nights with Benoit is that he commented afterwards, in his Toulouse accent, "Americans are so strange."
# 04 Mar 2002, 12:23PM: Also from IMDB: "NATO Chief Says Theaters Are Recovering." Ah, that wacky National Association of Theater Owners. This is exactly the sort of thing that would confuse ignorant anti-American extremists. Especially right under a story about the popularity of war films, entitled "War Is Swell."
# 04 Mar 2002, 12:23PM: The middle two panels of This Modern World amuse me. They remind me of the first drive to Bakersfield that Leonard and I ever made together, during which he explained the Liar's Paradox and different approaches to it.
# 04 Mar 2002, 12:31PM: Leonard gave me two terrific compliments recently. He said that my website is "content-rich," and he said I'm "intellectually honest." Thanks, Leonard! *hug*
# 04 Mar 2002, 03:47PM: I passed the CBEST.
# 05 Mar 2002, 12:00AM:
Too late I learned mnemonics for singing intervals on the major
scale. The first two notes of "Here Comes the Bride [The Wedding
March]" form a perfect fourth, and the first two notes of "My Bonnie
Lies Over the Ocean" form a major sixth. Those are the tough ones for
me, especially the sixth.
I'm writing a letter to Seth.
I'm making an appointment to tutor someone in Logic tomorrow. He seems to believe that 7pm counts as "late afternoon." On the Frat Planet, maybe.
# 05 Mar 2002, 08:20AM:
I'm trying to learn to follow the 20-20-20 rule my optometrist taught me. When I work at the computer, every twenty minutes I should take twenty seconds to focus on something twenty feet away. I don't think anything in my room is twenty feet from my computer chair, though.
Matt to me last night: "And keep this in context here, me talking to you -- he's really strange."
I woke up hearing someone washing dishes. It reminded me of the comforting someone's-in-the-kitchen feeling I get waking up in the Stockton house ("home"), only without the inevitably-someone's-going-to-criticize-me connotation.
# 05 Mar 2002, 08:29AM:
From Seth, on my Forty Days and Forty Nights review:
The joke in Peacefire was that censorware vendors paid the Forty
Days producers to depict a character as a site reviewer, as a sort of
product placement, in order to convince the public that there were
actually still humans working as site reviewers.
# 05 Mar 2002, 08:53AM: Months ago I noted that my personal space here in my new apartment is smaller than the personal space I had at my old apartment. I now realize that this is far outweighed by the huge new amount of only slightly shared space. Cool!
# 05 Mar 2002, 04:24PM:
Wow. I bought an ad at Kuro5hin and already more than a hundred people have clicked through to my journal. Is 9.5% clickthrough good? Tell me, Anirvan.
I should buy a K5 ad once I start my business, to tell geeks to send their friends and family to me for tutoring and tech support. How do I fit that into 95 catchy characters?
# 06 Mar 2002, 12:04AM: Have a good day, Zack!
# 06 Mar 2002, 12:19AM: Even the guy who originally claimed that 7pm was late afternoon has now retracted that claim. Good.
# 06 Mar 2002, 08:17AM:
Actual conversation last night between me and Matt's friend Chris:
"So you try not to be a ... prescriptivizer?"
"Well, I would say 'prescriptivist,' but I'm not going to say 'prescriptivizer' is wrong."
# 06 Mar 2002, 03:13PM:
Adam and I, as you may have noticed, have lunch together about twice a week. I enjoy our conversations, but sometimes he's just patently wrong. Unfortunately, today he wasn't; I was. Yes, Adam, you're right, most of the important aspects of conversations for most people don't depend on whether sentences are true or false, partly because so many sentences in conversation don't have objective truth-values, and partly because even false sentences contribute to other conversational processes, and I'm sure you could say this better than I and with more evidence to boot.
But I hesitate to say "truth isn't important in conversation," because untrue sentences -- as I've seen -- obstruct at least one purpose of conversation, viz., helping people understand each other. And I'm not going to create more interference, foul the signal with more noise, by lying just because it's convenient.
I'm glad I can have these discussions with friends and stay friends with them even when the argument gets con spirito.
So I've referenced Logic, Linguistics, and Music...quick! a Russian ref! K chyortu! There, that should do it.
# 07 Mar 2002, 09:31AM: Last night Leonard and I threw a little party for Zack, complete with candles and cake. And pizza and Enterprise and The West Wing. I've never felt so college in my life.
# 07 Mar 2002, 11:42AM: I think that Aaron Sorkin should limit himself to only writing opening scenes for The West Wing. It's always downhill from there.
# 07 Mar 2002, 02:44PM: Jeana mentions the third or fourth variant I've heard of the "if wishes were..." aphorism. There's "if wishes were horses then beggars would ride." There's "If wishes were fishes and I were a duck I'd swim to the bottom and never come up." There's something involving wishes being apples and water as ink or something. Any more?
# 07 Mar 2002, 02:55PM: Worthwhile lines from the Daily Californian: "Not giving a s--- proved to be a needless defense tactic..." and "Movie Review: Mo' Money, Mo' Problems, Mo' Clichés: Convention bitchslaps Cube and Epps."
# 08 Mar 2002, 01:05PM: Next time, on CES, my harrowing experience during the UC Berkeley power outage.
# 08 Mar 2002, 03:28PM: From Frances: the second line to "if wishes were horses then beggars would ride" is "If turnips were watches, I'd wear one by my side."
# 08 Mar 2002, 04:06PM:
When the blackout occurred, I was in a small, nearly empty restroom on an underground level of Dwinelle Hall. I did not know what had happened to extinguish the lights as I sat on the toilet in the complete darkness. Had a blackout occurred? Did these lights always go off in this bathroom a little after 5 pm? Was someone waiting to assault me?
Fortunately, I had flashlights with me, which reduced my panic, and I called out "Anybody there?" and heard no one at all and looked under the door and partition for feet and saw none and so I cautiously exited and stole out towards the light.
# 08 Mar 2002, 04:13PM: I would probably try to drop in on "a goth/industrial rave DJed by mimes."
# 09 Mar 2002, 01:07AM:
Friday was actually very good. Reasons follow.
I discovered what oatcakes are supposed to be, upon eating one I bought at the local coffeeshop. They're supposed to have the wholesome goodness of oatmeal and the portability of muffins. Terrific!
I checked my logic problem set with Jade and ate lunch with Adam and Jeana and we all had a grand old time.
I did my music homework and now I really understand intervals and compound intervals and harmonic inversions even.
I caught most of an optional logic lecture and understood why compactness is really neat and contributed to the discussion.
I conversed with Steve, visited Marisa at the Davis Co-op, and watched and participated in the Creativity Slam. She played the accordion, I recited three of my poems in alternation with her accordion riffs, and I used comedy to compensate for my bad rendition of "Someone to Watch Over Me" as she accompanied me on piano, and I performed stand-up comedy for approximately eight minutes and did my best set ever! Seriously, great audience appreciation for my whole performance. I had a great time.
(Set list: Riot/laundry, Eddie Bauer mannequins, shiny pants, I'm
Indian, political science, Gandhi was gay, sick students, "socially
constructed," jobs, Pakistanis, Tele-BEARS, elephant, attacking
Muslims, my international roommates.)
So I kicked heinie and took names. A good day.
# 10 Mar 2002, 11:54PM GMT+5:30:
So I enjoyed but fell asleep while listening to Bach's Mass in B
minor with Leonard and Seth, after showing Leonard a
few episodes of Yes, Minister. In other media experiences,
Leonard and I watched some MST3K, I'm almost done with Professor
McWhorter's new book The Power of Babel and reading every article
by him that I can find online, and I'm listening to and really enjoying
Guster's album Lost and Gone Forever (borrowed from Alexei).
McWhorter is really influencing me this semester. First Leonard
interrogated me wrt where a dialect turns into a new language, then this
evening I discussed with Crystal the proper status of "Black English."
I find linguistics pretty interesting this semester, but maybe that's just
because I'm getting to know cool linguists such as Adam and McWhorter.
# 10 Mar 2002, 11:56PM:
I carried a fire extinguisher on the BART this weekend, because Seth gave
it to me during the intermission of the Mass. I doubled over
laughing when he presented it to me, but I really am quite grateful for it; now my house has a fire extinguisher! At least three people on the BART
actually said to me some variant of "Hey, you've got a fire extinguisher!"
to which there's no really good response besides "Yes, I do."
# 11 Mar 2002, 12:39PM: Jade thinks I'm copping out when I make a predicate true or false by assigning the null set or the universe of discourse to the predicate's extension. I say it's perfectly fine, contrasting my "Wal*Mart Way" to her "Williams-Sonoma Method."
# 11 Mar 2002, 11:24PM: Sticky Snitch isn't Quidditch.
# 12 Mar 2002, 08:46AM:
From a hypothetical argument: From a hypothetical job fair:
"Calm down."
"It's not that I need to calm down, it's that you need to stop being wrong."
"Such a long line! What are they giving away here?"
"Jobs!"
# 12 Mar 2002, 12:18PM: I waited in line for about twenty minutes to get tickets to see Noam Chomsky speak on language and the mind and biolinguistics. I got two tickets for the Tuesday (19th) and two for the Wednesday (20th) speech, both of them at 4:10pm in Zellerbach Hall. Who wants to go with me to the Tuesday one? Who wants one of the two tickets to the Wednesday one? If you want one of my tickets, email me.
# 12 Mar 2002, 02:23PM:
Today, in pre-midterm Q&A, someone asked whether we should bring a Scantron for the test. Professor McWhorter evinced bewilderment and confusion, touching on such topics as the burning and ripping of CDs, MP3 players, electronics stores, and his general old-fogieness. A student actually gave such a form to him to help him comprehend the concept. Alethia and I later explained to him, in detail, what Scantron forms are and how they work.
As you may have guessed, Linguistics 5 lectures are very entertaining this semester. I suggest you visit -- 100 GPB (the Genetics and Plant Biology building auditorium, northwest region of UC Berkeley's campus), Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12:30pm till 2pm.
But not day-after-tomorrow, as that's our midterm.
# 12 Mar 2002, 02:41PM: Wow! It looks as though all my free Chomsky tickets are already spoken for by Seth, Steve, and Nandini.
# 13 Mar 2002, 08:51AM: Yesterday Leonard received a physical letter that I had sent him the previous day! From Berkeley to San Francisco in about twenty-four hours!
# 13 Mar 2002, 08:55AM: Remember how Professor McWhorter entertained us by saying he didn't know what a Scantron is? Well, Adam told me that McWhorter did the same bit last semester! Oh, the fraud. I feel betrayed.
# 13 Mar 2002, 03:43PM:
Tomorrow is Pi Day.
In more exciting news, my flatmate Crystal has met Andrew Wiles! I only found out a few days ago that she spent two weeks at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. How neat! She showed me a photo featuring her and Dr. Wiles, and her copy of his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, the first page of which he autographed. This is awesome.
# 13 Mar 2002, 03:44PM: The Cal Libertarians have put up some flyers around and about campus that picture the Bill of Rights and state, "No Bill of Rights, no government. That was the deal." If I got nothing else out of my political science major, I at least got to nitpick that. The United States did have a government before the various states ratified the Constitution. We spent several years under the Articles of Confederation (the League of Nations of US governments). So, more properly, the flyers should read, "No Bill of Rights, no Constitution," or "No Bill of Rights, no strong central government," or something. But that's sloganeering for you. Can't even trust the Libertarians.
# 13 Mar 2002, 03:48PM:
From lunch with Adam today: "Is this irony, or just bad? and if it's irony, does that mean it isn't bad?"
I've spent several hours now talking with Leonard, Devin, Steve, Adam, Bem, and probably others regarding Leonard's problems with Snow Crash; he posted an essaylet about said arguments today. Coming soon: my response.
# 14 Mar 2002, 11:18AM: Regarding the Chomsky lecture tickets, my earlier announcement is invalid. My sister has decided not to come, so there is now one Wednesday ticket free. Who wants it?
# 14 Mar 2002, 12:01PM: Less than an hour till my first midterm of my last semester of college. Wearing my Ni pukha ni pera / K chyortu t-shirt for good luck. Oh, I should check that list of inflectional morphemes again.
# 14 Mar 2002, 03:03PM: I actually said to someone today, "I have a geek streak, but I'm not EECS."
# 14 Mar 2002, 03:04PM: Okay, the last Chomsky ticket is gone again. Adam claimed it.
# 14 Mar 2002, 05:08PM:
Yes, yes, Linguistics midterm over, I probably aced morphology but I messed up phonology, no surprise.
I tend to start entries with "Yes," or "Okay," or "So". I think this is because when I write one of these entries I want to imitate Leonard.
# 15 Mar 2002, 08:19AM:
CAESAR.
The Ides of March are come.
SOOTHSAYER.
Ay, Caesar; but not gone.
# 15 Mar 2002, 12:44PM:
The problem with discussing interesting topics in Russian class -- well, more interesting than "How do you get to school each day?" -- is that you find out that your classmates hold disagreeable opinions (cf. the gun control argument a while back) or don't know as much as you'd have expected.
Case in point: Today we tried our hands at explaining how global warming/the greenhouse effect and the destruction of the ozone layer work. I'm the worst Russian speaker in the class, yet I best explained the process of the greenhouse effect. Shouldn't college students in Berkeley know the process of the greenhouse effect?
# 15 Mar 2002, 03:25PM: Jade is a great seatmate for Logic lecture. She knows just when to wake me up so that I reach consciousness when the professor starts introducing actual new material (usually in the last ten minutes of class).
# 16 Mar 2002, 09:44AM GMT+5:30:
This morning I read the first two short stories in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. I like them, much as I liked the stories in Anjana Appachana's Incantations and Other Stories. Both sets have that indie-film vibe and Indian-diaspora genre vibe going, although Anirvan (consummate connoiseur of all things indie and diasporic) could probably talk my ear off about nuances that distinguish the two, and I'm pretty sure Lahiri's prose is more subtle (maybe this is why Lahiri has a Pulitzer and Appachana doesn't).
I only hope Lahiri's novels don't stink as much as Appachana's Listening Now, which my mother and I both hated and both couldn't finish.
# 16 Mar 2002, 04:54PM:
I'm listening to A Prairie Home Companion on a rather sketchy (perhaps "sketch", since, according to an East Coast friend, that's now an Adj.) radio set, whilst internetting with a few Netscape windows open. I just noticed that the static is noticeably worse when I'm working in one of the windows than when the other is on top. Now that's just Van Eck freaky.
If Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit overuses "Yes" and "He's right," then Keillor in this week's monologue was practically Reynoldian in his use of "Lutherans!"
# 16 Mar 2002, 07:31PM:
Lahiri mentions the East Coast department store Filene's and its subsidiary, Filene's Basement, in several stories in Interpreter of Maladies. As John probably recalls, I visited a Filene's Basement in mid-July of last year. The day my group left for St. Petersburg from Washington, D.C., after realizing that I had no sweatpants with me, I lugged John with me out into the urban wilderness. First we visited a Kinko's and paid exorbitant rates for net access, and then I found a clothing store -- the aforementioned Filene's Basement -- via suggestions from streetgoers, and bought a pair of soft blue drawstring pants.
My sister is bugging me to take the LSAT and GRE before I leave college. She's right, perhaps, in that I should "keep my options open" by taking the tests, but I just wish that for once I could put my foot down and ask her not to nag me about something and she would ACTUALLY STOP.
Well, either I'm safe in saying that here, or she actually reads this, and I'd be glad with either.
# 17 Mar 2002, 08:46AM:
Just this morning whilst lying awake I wondered what sort of tag LiveJournal users use to specially identify each other in posts, and then I find out that Adam has obliged me.
I wonder how healthy it is for people on LJ to identify each other by username when they know each other much better in real life. "I had lunch with myth." No, you had lunch with Adam, who is much, much more than his journal or his username. Do I go around calling myself "brainwane" and saying "I hung out with leonardr"? Certainly the demands of weblog posting are different from the demands of face-to-face conversation, and people on LiveJournal are posting to a community where the internal representation of "Adam" is generally less accessible than the internal representation of "LJ user myth." But don't you get into Eco-y catastrophe territory if you start mistaking the signifier for the signified? And doesn't that mistake get more probable if you're operating on three layers of symbolism (username --> real name --> person)?
I suppose that perhaps people on LiveJournal think the symbolism goes more like (username --> person) and think that a username is just as "real" a name as the one on your birth certificate. But you don't know a person via a weblog the same way you know 'em through face-to-face interaction. I'm not saying you know 'em better or worse, just differently, although I harbor a suspicion that you simply don't know someone as well if you just know 'em online, ever since I met Leonard after reading his weblog for a year and a half.
I'm not my whole self here. If you are your whole self in your weblog, if I could completely know you by just reading your weblog, then you've broken some barrier and become a Philip K. Dick character, or you have a very small life.
# 18 Mar 2002, 03:25PM:
The written portion of the Musicianship midterm ended a few minutes ago, and it frazzled me something awful. Oi. And I have three more tests waiting for me later this week. Is it still Monday?
On the upside, I had lunch with Steve "It's okay to be prescriptivist" Robertson, and I bought a flower. People in the OCF agree it's some sort of lily, but can't tell the exact type.
Update: People now think it's an orchid. It cost four bucks, so maybe.
Further Update: A few people are very sure it's a tigerlily. Again, perhaps.
# 18 Mar 2002, 04:50PM: Yesterday I drove my sister's car from Stockton to Berkeley. That was the hardest driving I've ever done: curvy highways in the dark with a pounding rain. Eeee! But my sister helped direct me and she said I did fine. As she noted, after this, everything else should be easy!
# 19 Mar 2002, 11:02AM: Leonard's on his backup site for the rest of this week. I'm admiring my tigerlily and waiting anxiously to take midterms and find out how I've done. Next week I'll take the behind-the-wheel driving exam again. I feel sort of content and normal-ish, which should probably be enough for me, and basically is.
# 19 Mar 2002, 11:07AM: Surreal Estate tells me that people are crazy about finding a place to live in the Bay Area, and that prices are similarly sumashedshiye, "recession" notwithstanding. Yet yesterday I walked by my old apartment, which I left at the end of January, and it's still tenantless. Huh?
# 19 Mar 2002, 02:25PM: I saw a sign on a door into MLK Student Union that announced overflow seating for Noam Chomsky's speech today. It read, "Chomsky overflow in Pauley Ballroom". I have never before seen the phrase "Chomsky overflow." As Alethia noted, it brings to mind images of waves and waves of Noam Chomsky washing over the hills.
# 19 Mar 2002, 08:49PM: Tonight I saw a woman at Tully's Cafe who substantially resembled a twentysomething Eleanor Roosevelt.
# 20 Mar 2002, 09:04AM:
This morning I walked by a large truck painted with the Starving Students Movers logo. On the back I read a disclaimer: "As an equal opportunity employer we employ students as well as other qualified applicants."
Yesterday evening I saw an eighteen-wheeler painted with the Domino's Pizza logo. That's a big delivery!
More funny Chomsky phrases: "Chomsky scalpers" and "after the Chomsky."
# 20 Mar 2002, 09:05AM:
Shweta and me after the Chomsky:
Shweta: "How did you enjoy your nap?"
Me: "Fine, except some guy was talking the whole time."
# 20 Mar 2002, 01:05PM:
Remember that episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation", last season, "Attached," where Crusher says to Picard, "Coffee and croissant. That's all you want. Coffee and croissant."?
To the tune of that quote: Weblogs and sex. That's all we talk about. Weblogs and sex.
# 21 Mar 2002, 08:38AM: One midterm left to go. You would think a singing midterm would be cool, like a singing telegram, but it's not such a carefree affair when you're the one singing.
# 22 Mar 2002, 09:12AM: From Leonard: "Am I a butterfly who dreams I am a baby, or am I a baby dressed up in a butterfly suit?"
# 22 Mar 2002, 10:00AM GMT+5:30:
Many, many media experiences over the past few days have I had. On Tuesday I saw Noam Chomsky speak. I couldn't follow his speech, which was about about theories of linguistics or something.
On Wednesday I went to BAM!, er, BAM's exhibit of photographs depicting human migration. Certainly many images haunted me, especially pictures of dead bodies and of children. But the most striking photo showed me a woman working the land in the foreground and a river and a skyscraper in the background. The caption informed me that, in Indonesia, one often finds farmland and highrise buildings within sight of each other. This bit of data uniquely made globalization come alive for me.
Yesterday, Thursday, I saw Gosford Park again. A very good movie that stood up to repeated viewing and that Leonard enjoyed. (He's as picky as I am, so that's something.) Gosford Park -- what Wodehouse left out but could have written had he been more malicious.
Speaking of Wodehouse, I finished A Few Quick Ones and (as always) loved his short stories, especially the ones where plots turn on coincidences and scheming, rather than just scheming. Now I'm working on Stanislaw Lem's A Perfect Vacuum.
Also: Hey Seth: there's a database on agriculture [subsidies?] called Agricola. And the lobby of Sather Tower on the UC Berkeley campus holds an exhibit on the loyalty oath controversy.
# 22 Mar 2002, 03:54PM: You Can't Get There From Here: The University of California at Berkeley set up some internet kiosks in the lobby of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union. Only today did I discover that the University had also installed censorware on these kiosks. And so they won't get me see Seth's diary. Thanks, CyberPatrol!
# 22 Mar 2002, 04:02PM: I really hope Google doesn't give in to the Scientologists and continue to delist xenu.net, a site critical of Scientology.
# 23 Mar 2002, 04:35PM: Much fun recently, what with Strike Up The Band! last night (1927 war satire by the Gershwins and George S. Kaufman) and a party at my sister's today.
# 24 Mar 2002, 10:43AM: As the KQED announcer told us last night at 8, "A Prairie Home Companion will be trotted out again tomorrow morning at 11..."
# 24 Mar 2002, 06:09PM:
Last night, while talking with Leonard, I messed up some of the lyrics of the song "It's a Small World." He and I discussed the possibility of a parody and came up with a few lines. Here's the result:
(Refrain)
In a world where one man defies them all
Well, it needs a hero and he hears the call
And he has but one chance
His name's Liberty Valance
It's a movie ad cliché
Refrain: It's a movie ad cliché
It's the NATO states and the Warsaw Pact
He's mad, someone's gonna pay
Do you feel lucky today?
It's a film cliché
If they come in through Germany we have to act
He is our only hope
Too bad he's such a dope
It's a movie ad cliché
# 24 Mar 2002, 06:33PM:
You remember that I warned you that it would depress thee to hit the "random user" link on LiveJournal? Well, just as bad but more entertaining in its "this is what our civilization has wrought?" effects:
Think of some failed, awful, twenty-episode sitcom that UPN or Fox or NBC produced for use on weekday afternoons or Saturday mornings. "California Dreamin'" or "Breaker High" will do. Google for the title of that sitcom (example). Look at some of the more awful-looking results. Say aloud to yourself, "Four thousand results?! There's a role-playing game? The lyrics to the theme song include 'and hope is a thing that we can all have today / Na na na na na hey hey / Carry me away'?" Laugh or weep, as is your preference.
# 25 Mar 2002, 01:48PM GMT+5:30:
From the latest issue of that esteemed journal of diaspora, India Post, two items.
First: in the "Woman Post" (two-page spread devoted to women), an article (if you can call it that) repeating some press release about the latest and greatest "a little alcohol consumption lowers some women's risks of heart disease" study. The graphic: some image lifted from a liquor ad, featuring a scantily clad white female with a come-hither look, as well as two bottles of booze. Huh?
Second: a news-brief, two paragraphs, in "Youth Post," telling us -- thanks to a new Scientific Study! -- that young people listening to techno music drive more dangerously than people listening to ballads or silence. Leonard is vindicated!
An unrelated "huh?": I'm using Netscape on Windows 98. Somehow a Microsoft Internet Explorer pop-up just appeared on my screen. WTH? Oh yeah, browser/OS integration. What was it Malcolm X said? Alex Haley wrote that, while stirring cream into his coffee, Malcolm X used to say, "My coffee is the only thing I like integrated."
# 26 Mar 2002, 07:49AM GMT+5:30:
Whistling update: After months of practice, I can now produce a whistle on demand (after a few false starts). Now I'm working on pitch modulation.
Yesterday I finished Lem's A Perfect Vacuum. I hope to read Fiasco soon, since Leonard really liked it. As for Vacuum: I liked each fake book review on its own, but all of them together tired me out, especially since each review was more summary than analysis (necessarily, yes, but still counter to the review form). Certainly each review provoked thought. I enjoyed several satires in which Lem described the logically inevitable results of literary trends.
Conjure Wife? Okay, boss.
# 26 Mar 2002, 06:46PM:
A not-very-helpful driving lesson took place today. The most interesting thing I learned (besides the oh-so-enthralling "you're not scanning enough" and so on) was that a certain empty lot at an intersection in downtown Stockton used to be a house where a Dahmer-esque serial killer lived. The movie Rampage is about this man, it seems. Never heard of it.
I really should take my notebook whenever my mother and I do errands, just in case we end up going to the dollar store. All I remember is "Celebration Santas" or some such, a cinnamon candy.
The dentist told me I should get my wisdom teeth out as a preemptive measure. "As soon as you don't have insurance, bam, they'll turn into a problem," he predicted.
Bananas, Leonard. Maybe you can eat bananas.
# 26 Mar 2002, 09:53PM: In Mexico, is the card game "Uno" called "One"?
# 26 Mar 2002, 10:10PM:
As long as we have all these derogatory phrases for people based on
their seeming pretentions to races that are not their own (e.g., Oreo,
egg, banana, coconut), we should get consistent and complete, no? So
what's a good brown-on-the-inside, white-on-the-outside foodstuff?
"Yogurt-covered raisin" is consistent but too unnatural and hard to say.
Note also that people who sympathize with our alien oppressors could be
nicknamed Kiwis.
# 27 Mar 2002, 07:23AM:
About to go at the behind-the-wheel driver's test for the third time. People tell me to "be confident," but I was confident the last two times, and I failed. This time it's worse; my learner's permit expires tomorrow, so if I fail this time, I'll have to go through the entire rigamarole again -- passing the permit test, that is.
On the up side, I got to converse with Angel last night. She's having a rough time of it working and attending UC Davis. Hang in there, kiddo!
# 27 Mar 2002, 11:17AM:
I passed! "Sumana: License to Drive." Yee-ha!
Before the test, as I waited for the examiner, I thought of the depressingness of the fact that I got a 1550 on my SATs and yet took three or more times to pass my driver's test. After passing the exam, that doesn't seem as bad as I'd thought.
# 28 Mar 2002, 01:08PM:
I feel only slightly exalted as a newly licensed driver. If I were
younger, I might feel as though this were more of a milestone, but as
it is, I feel more tense about career and academics and relationships
than I do about the "freedom" and "power" concomitant with a driver's
license.
It is true, however, that yesterday, after getting my license, I
suddenly looked at the family Corolla with a proprietary sensation.
The words would go something like, "Now I control you, not the other
way around." This might just be because now I don't have to take
those darn lessons anymore.
# 28 Mar 2002, 01:15PM:
I've signed up to take the LSAT, even though I have neither the grades
nor the motivation to attend law school. Now I sign up to take the
GRE, even though ditto for graduate school. As Aunt Constance sighed in
Gosford Park, "Why must we do these things?"
Oh, yeah, my mom and dad and sister won't leave me alone about it. That's why.
# 28 Mar 2002, 01:16PM:
I find it rather amusing that my logic homework includes schematizing and translating into English such sentences as "Every self-respecting student who adulates no professor is respected by some student whom no professor respects."
I had more fun schematizing "There is a real number between every two non-identical real numbers" with only the predicates "x is less than y" and "x is identical to y" (assuming that the universe of discourse is real numbers, that is). I think that woulda been harder had I not done all those exercises in Gödel, Escher, Bach over the winter break.
I'm almost done with the homework that's due eight days from now. Either it was easy, or I'm quite good, or I've made a lot of mistakes in thinking problems were easier than they actually are. I remember hearing this "ten hours a week" figure bandied about during the first lecture with regards to "time spent by most students on this class". So far it's been more like four, if that, not counting my work as a logic tutor for another guy in my class.
# 28 Mar 2002, 02:44PM: Just registered to take the GRE tomorrow somewhere in San Francisco. Now to figure out how to get there. TripPlanner, here I come!
# 29 Mar 2002, 10:24AM: My flatmates seemed very amused last night. "I'm taking the GRE tomorrow...I just decided/found out today..." Thank goodness Steve came over and helped me remember y=mx + b and all that. GRE prep books are useless when you're half-asleep. Just a tip.
# 29 Mar 2002, 10:12PM:
I traveled to San Francisco, got my first shoeshine ever, and took the
Graduate Records Exam. [Is that still its official name? Or did
ETS change it, as they changed "SAT" from "Aptitude" to "Assessment"? (Assessment!) And
didja know that FFA no longer stands for "Future Farmers of America"
and now is a meaningless series of capital letters that stands for
nothing (and, presumably, falls for anything)?]
I disliked many things about that experience. I disliked the secrecy
and the antisepticism and the power asymmetry and the Windows boxes and
the cameras focused on the test-takers at all times and keeping my
belongings in a locker for the duration of the test and not being able
to take away my scratch paper. And I disliked the computerised test
on which I couldn't skip a question and answer it later. I rushed through
the last few questions on two of the four sections. Oh, yeah, another
thing I dislike: the four sections are Math, Logic, Verbal, and Experimental.
I had two math sections. I had scratch paper scarcity and didn't want
to lose time by asking for more!
I did well, it seems. I chose to view my scores. 780 Quantitative,
730 Analytic, 720 Verbal. My parents and sister are proud, as is
Leonard. And it's over, so that's something.
# 30 Mar 2002, 10:37AM:
The myths and the realities of jobs at Google.
"MYTH: It's too late to join Google.
Unfortunately, that's not how they actually answer the "myth."
"MYTH: Google is "just a search engine" and search is a solved problem."
Leonard, upon hearing this "myth," laughed very, very hard.
"Why is he bitter?"
"He's bitter because he's a CS grad student at some second-tier university and his thesis topic isn't interesting and he hates his advisor. That's why he's bitter. And his girlfriend just dumped him."
"He had a girlfriend?"
"Yeah, but he only got to third base with her."
REALITY: We have a jobs page, you idiot.""I can imagine just the sort of person who'd say that. 'Arrr, search is a solved problem.' He's a bitter CS grad student."
# 30 Mar 2002, 10:49AM: Yes, I'm visiting the anarchist bookfair at Golden Gate Park this afternoon. I'll probably be there from 2 till 4 or 5.
# 30 Mar 2002, 06:49PM GMT+5:30:
I visited the Anarchist Bookfair and hung out a great deal with Steve and met up with Anirvan and Seth. I also saw people whom I knew (sort of) had not expected to see: namely, Reina Palacios (now Reina Hutchinson), a person I'd known in high school; Peter, a fella I vaguely know from Cal; and Keith Knight, a cartoonist whose "The K Chronicles" appears on Wednesdays at Salon.com.
I bought merchandise from Knight and got his autograph. I also got:
Now I'm hanging out at home, the room to myself, listening to A Prairie Home Companion and hoping to read and do homework. A good weekend so far.
I would have bought Divorce Your Car! by Katie Alvord (New Society Publishers), but I spent far too much as it is.
# 30 Mar 2002, 07:54PM: Garrison Keillor's monologue on tonight's A Prairie Home Companion -- on Passover and Seder -- made me cry just now. This is why I listen. Just when I worry that he's getting repetitive, he surprises and moves me.
# 30 Mar 2002, 11:05PM: Queen Elizabeth died and nobody told me!
# 30 Mar 2002, 11:12PM: Oh, okay, she was the Queen Mother Elizabeth I, not Queen Elizabeth II. Sorry for the confusion.
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