5-30-06

I got the residential teaching assitant job at Case! It'll only be for one month, leaving plenty of room for board games and Oblivion, but at least I won't be a loser ALL summer.

5-29-06

The next executive chef at the White House will be, for the first time in history, a woman.

5-28-06

"Starry Night," the famous painting by Van Gogh, resides in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Other famous paintings in that museum's collection include Picasso's "Girl Before a Mirror," Wyeth's "Christina's World," a canvas that's entirely blue, a canvas that's entirely black, a canvas that's entirely white, a canvas that's entirely olive green, and a giant square blue canvas with OOF written across the middle in capital yellow letters.

5-27-06

New York City isn't split up into multiple school districts like Columbus is. The entire city is one big district. Admission into the top public schools is therefore determined by scores on standardized tests.

5-26-06

We'll be coming back Tuesday, not Monday, and I only brought three pairs of socks. This worries me. Recall the lesson learned on 2-16-06: "If you pull an all-nighter and neglect to change your socks, by the end of the second day they start to smell really bad." I won't be staying up all night, but you can see the related problem here.

5-25-06

White chocolate chip macadamia cookies are my favorite type of cookies, even though I like neither white chocolate (which isn't real chocolate) nor macadamia nuts (because they leave an unpleasant aftertaste).

I'll be on vacation tomorrow through Monday, so I won't be able to update until Tuesday. Sorry!

5-24-06

You should wipe clean the top of canned goods before opening them. The rat poop that collects on top of the cans during warehouse storage will get into your food if you don't remove it.

My source assures me, however, that licking the inside foil of yogurt covers is perfectly acceptable.

5-23-06

During free-fall, the force of air against your skin is so great that oxygen diffuses into your bloodstream. Thus, when you go skydiving, you don't need to breathe.

[Steven Bouyack claims he read this somewhere, but it's probably a load of crap. -- Ed.]

5-22-06

Lila kindly pointed out to me ("bor, that is wrong. you are stupid") that 500 sheets of paper do not weigh 24 pounds (See 5-19-06, below). I got this erroneous fact off the 500-sheet package of paper by our printer that says "24 lb" on it. lb != lbs, it seems. I weighed myself with the paper and then without it, and the difference was a mere seven pounds.

5-21-06

After seeing "The Da Vinci Code," I am saddened to conclude that Paul Bettany, one of my favorite actors, works much better as a jovial imaginary beer-loving roommate than as a psychopathic murderous albino monk.

5-20-06

http://ph.otogra.ph is a great place to kill time looking at pretty pictures. Lots of good candidates for desktop backgrounds here.

5-19-06

500 sheets of standard white printing paper weigh 24 pounds. I guess that explains why I had so much trouble carrying 3000 pages' worth of tests in a box, on foot, twenty minutes across campus (see 5-5-06, below).

5-18-06

When I play Oblivion on my laptop, everything works fine except the graphics are white. Everything in the game is a funky shade of white. I tried playing the game on my parents' computer, and it works, except I have to set the graphics so low that the water isn't rendered (it's black, though, instead of white) and all the monsters are shapeless blobs of colored slime. All of the textures are composed of pixels as big as my fist.

I think it's time for a new computer.

5-17-06

My mom has several crowns on her teeth and today one of them broke. She called the dentist and explained the problem as follows:

"I don't have one of my crowns anymore. I mean, I have it. But it's not in my mouth."

People with imperfect mastery of a language often find funny ways to say the simplest things.

5-16-06

Scorpion bites, though not as bad as, say, rattlesnake bites, are still pretty serious and require hospitalization.

5-15-06

In Asian culture, the numbers 6 and 8 are considered lucky. Numbers composed of lucky digits are lucky, too, so skyscrapers will have 88 floors, and 666 is a very lucky number.

5-14-06

My cat is shitting all over the brand new white carpet we installed in the basement.

5-13-06

According to the official rules of foosball, a shot isn't scored if it hits a wall or a defender on its way into the goal. It's a good thing nobody actually plays by the official rules because otherwise 98% of my shots would be discredited.

5-12-06

"They say there are two kinds of losers: bad sports and good actors." -- Larry Evans

5-11-06

The subjunctive voice and the passive voice are not the same thing.

5-10-06

My chemistry students averaged better than my Java students. This is in spite of the fact that A) the chemistry class is hard, B) the Java class is a breeze, C) I was shaky in my knowledge of chemistry and made horrible mistakes while teaching it, and D) I taught Java very well. How strange! Next semester I must be sure to instill more fear into my Java students.

5-9-06

Today I had an interview for a residential TA position at an academic summer camp for high school kids. At one point the interviewer asked me, "How would you handle the situation if one of the students had a crush on you?"

Dave's suggested response: "Depends on if she's hot."

Lacking Dave's wit, I desperately tried to think of something good and failed. I challenge somebody to think of a more horrifying interview question.

5-8-06

Upwords is a stupid game. I'll stick to Scrabble.

5-7-06

Try www.easybib.com the next time you have to write a works cited page. You just enter in all the information you know about a source and the site arranges it in bibliographic format for you.

5-6-06

"Last summer, my friend O. and I went sailing. He is a quit dry, tight up person, working in public sector. In the evening, safely moored in a quiet place, we started a game of Settlers, and - because of the temperature. we played naked."

Read the rest of this (and other funny stories) here.

===

Two facts: 1) Kevin and I happened not to play in any of the same games at board game club today. 2) Both of us won both of our games.

Now I don't propose that these facts are in any way related, but there it is.

5-5-06

If you carry something really heavy long enough, your muscles get completely shot and stop working for a while.

Whist is better than bridge.

5-4-06

"According to a recent survey, only about a quarter of the population of the United States understands that evolution is about as well established as the fact that water is H2O." -- Daniel Dennett

5-3-06

"I would like to become a diva." -- Professor Koenigsberger

"I'm going to go home and put my balls away." -- Professor Koenigsberger

My postcolonial lit class went to an Indian restaurant today to celebrate the end of the semester. I ordered a "classic" Indian dish (I forget what it's called) and it was absurdly spicy even though I asked for the mild version. Apparently "mild" in Indian cuisine means that it will merely set your stomach on fire, as opposed to disintegrating your tongue instantaneously.

5-2-06

I played Mario Party for the first time today and was profoundly unimpressed. Imagine what Fuzion Frenzy would be like if all the minigames were terrible and the final winner was determined entirely by luck. Literally: in a four-player game, a monkey trained to press the A button over and over again would have about a 20% chance of WINNING. I'm not joking. I may not be a monkey, but I lost every single mini-game and still won overall.

Lesson: flipping a coin achieves the same result as playing Mario Party, but in 1/3600th of the time. I think next time I'll take the coin.

5-1-06

Avuncular means "uncle-like."

I got an A on my last English paper. I suppose I still have some of my old magic touch after all.

Subway subs get really salty if you leave them in the fridge for half a day. I don't get salt on mine, so I have no idea where the salty flavor came from.

4-30-06

I am no longer capable of writing a paper without staying up all night. This is a distressing development.