More Mom & Dad Tales

Tonight, my dad expounded on the controversial topic of modern day Korean pop stars versus the classical Korean singer-performers of his generation, and doled out valuable counsel in between shots of Bek Se Ju, a tasty Korean rice wine that tastes like ginseng tea. He is a very wise man for someone who made so many mistakes in his lifetime- or I guess, because of the mistakes. He is also a fun person to drink with.

The other night, my mom and I stopped by at a Chevron. Filling the tank took no time, so afterward, I sat in the car waiting as my mom carried on with her newest obsession: wiping down the car with her dollar-store glass cleaner every chance she gets. Spray spray spray. Wipe wipe. Spray spray spray. Wipe wipe.

Suddenly, about 30 feet to our right, this dude sprints to the car parked there and starts kicking the hell out of the car door, while the girl inside yells and curses her brains out. I'm sitting in the car in severe shock and thinking somewhere in the folds of my gray matter that I should dial 911, but I seem to have lost the ability to move to look for my phone, so I just stare stupidly. I think the Hamburger Helper hand, or even the Paper Clip from Word would have been more helpful than me.

Luckily, the girl herself brings out her cell and starts dialing 911, mute curses still streaming out of her mouth a mile a minute (her window was rolled up so I couldn't hear what she was saying, but her eyes and arm gestures said it all). Then, I guessed that the dude had taken enough of his anger out on the car because he ran away, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

But then, 30 seconds later, dude sprints back to the car, this time with a sledgehammer-type weapon in his hand and starts wacking the window with it! Bam bam bam! Pieces of glass start flying everywhere, and I'm thinking oh shit, phone phone phone oh shit! But then I realize it's the head of the weapon that's breaking into bits and flying everywhere, not the window. The guy I guess realizes the same thing, so after he wacks the shit out of the car window, he runs away again. For good this time.

Finally able to tear my eyes away from this scene, I look for my mom and realize that she's still cleaning the car window with her dollar-store imitation windex. Spray spray spray. Wipe wipe. Spray spray spray. Wipe wipe.

Hoo hoo hoo lord! Every time I think of that night I burst out laughing as I picture my mom, this little Asian lady calmly wiping away at the stains on her car window while a full blown act of violence is taking place 30 feet behind her.

Musings and Tips

Smoke from a chimney: it's filthy, it pollutes the air and our lungs, it smears the sky black, it's not natural at all, but for some reason, it's pretty,...romantic,...the perfect touch to a sunrise over the city scape.

The best way to occupy your time during a layover at the airport:

If you have >= 3.5 hours, take the train to the city and take a whirlwind tour.

If you have<= 3.5 hours, go to the nearest newsstand and catch up on the latest events. Pick up at least 1 local paper, the Wall Street (where on the left hand column of the front page, they give convenient bullet point summaries of the goings-on in the world), the NYT, and USA Today (read the Life section to catch up on pop culture- movies and such). Don't buy them, for Chrissake, just stand there for 45 minutes or so reading. I used to do that with the NYT at Wawa every morning before work, after purchasing my daily jug of Wawa diet iced green tea.

Pre-E-Ticket Days of Yore

Does anyone remember how we booked flights before the advent of e-tickets? Because I sure didn't. This question randomly popped into my mind as I dazedly traversed the Columbus Airport (due to a long long red-eye flight, I am presently existing in a state of extreme zombieness). I vaguely remembered that we had to bring the ticket to the airport on the day of travel, but that's all I remember of those pre-historic days. The only way I could think of was that we called in to book tickets. But that was crazy, I thought. That would clog up phone lines. Or something. It just sounds crazy, calling in to book tickets.

But, as I discovered through a quick online search, that is exactly what we used to do before the advent of electronic tickets! I can't believe it! How quaint were our ways! Amazing...

Also, I was reaching for a paper towel in the bathroom- it was one of those sensored ones that just zoom right out when you reach for it. Next to me stood a little blonde girl on a chair as her mom helped her wash her hands.

"Kid, we didn't have those when I was a kid," I said to her, gesturing to the sensored paper towel ejector. Man the things that can change in just a couple decades.

Umma-ism

Here is another hilarious umma-ism (umma=mom in Korean):

"You should eat a little something before we go out to dinner."

And:

Umma: Who's this?

Me: Leonardo DiCaprio.

Umma: Lehnodacabbri?

Me: Lee-uhn

Umma: Lee-uhn

Me: -ar

Umma: -ar

Me: doh

Umma: doh

Me: Leonardo

Umma: Leonardo. Leonardo.

Me: Dicaprio. Di-

Umma: What there's more?! Sick!

Instructions for drawing a picture of Angie's dream house

1. Take a crayon.

2. Draw a fancy treehouse.
a) Winding staircase entrance.
b) Skylights.
c) Fireplace.

3. Add a swing set.

4. Color in a sparkling lake.

5. Add a canoe.

Sarah and I took a day trip to Poulsbo to visit a friend who lives and works on an organic farm there. She took us out canoeing off Bainbridge Island, and it was the most wonderful adventure. There's nothing like the feeling of being so close to the water, just like the ducks. References were made, or images swam in my head, of Life of Pi, Tom Hanks and Wilson, canoeing in Sarah Finseth's backyard pond (and getting lost), Ariel and Prince Eric, the Row row row your boat nursery rhyme, the whaleship Essex (and regrettably, those math story problems that go: "If you're swimming against the current at x mph, with the speed of the current being y mph...")...as we paddled through the harbor, winding through the ferries and bobbing alongside the ducks, with the pink-gold Seattle skyline behind us and the blue sky above us. The moments are rare, when my ideal world aligns with the real one, but when it does...whew! It's marvelous! I felt inexplicably content, as well as slightly sweaty under that life-vest.

Regression

After a marvelous day spent in downtown Seattle, Sarah and I are back home watching Cinderella. Sup sup! Trap trap! Cat cat! Gus Gus! Apparently, mice speak doublespeak too.

Oh my god, I just noticed foreshadowing! There's a scene where Cinderella climbs the stairs to take breakfast to her ugly stepsisters, and she loses a shoe- just like when she runs away from the ball later! I knew we should've watched this in English class.

The most popular version of Cinderella was written by Frenchman Charles Perrault, hence the French surnames announced at the ball. According to the wikipedia entry, "One can argue that this is one of the greatest stories in the history of story-telling times." I suppose anything can be argued in this day and age.

Mood Ring

I'm irritated from trying to understand mangled English while being congested, fatigued, and constantly cold. Bleh. But I am also still slightly caffeinated by the doubly spectacular Bourne Ultimatum. So I think I can get through the rest of this editing process without blowing a fuse. Only a nose maybe.

Home=Free Food+Extravant Doting

I've only been home for 3 hours, and my mom's already trying to stuff me like a turkey until I wind up a statistic (one of the 60% of overweight Americans).

Mom: Angie, taste this!

Me: Ok!...Mmm, it's delicious!

Mom: Want to have some with rice?

Me: Tomorrow, mom. I'm not hungry right now.

10 minutes later...(repeat above dialogue).

15 minutes later...(repeat above dialogue, yet again).

10 minutes later...(you know the deal).

Mom: Tomorrow, tomorrow, it's always tomorrow. I thought your name was Angie, not Annie!

Me: Mom, that's cuz you keep asking me the same question over and over again. I'm not going to answer the same question 3 different ways!

Alas, reason fails in the ears of a mother who misses coddling her younguns. Also, yet again, I embellished the dialogue with the "Angie, not Annie" bit.

Double the Pleasure, Double the Fun, and Double the Clothes

One of the terrific benefits of having a twin sister is that we can borrow from each other's wardrobe, so really it's like having twice the wardrobe. Most of the time, thought, I'm the one who borrows from Sarah's wardrobe, so I dunno...should I be insulted by that? Whatever, so not only can we borrow from each other's wardrobe, but sometimes I get clothes for free once Sarah gets tired of something, so sometimes I get to actually come to own one of her cool outfits.

But usually it takes at least 6 months for her to tire of an article of clothing, so it takes patience, this acquiring of sister's clothing thing. But I tease her about it all in good fun all the while. Take the following incident, for instance:

Two weeks ago, Sarah bought a beautiful blue summer dress at H&M patterned with a lighter blue heart-star-flower petal pattern and a poofy skirt part (sorry, I don't know the technical term for that). One week after the purchase, she wore it, and it looked gorgeous on her.

"Oh my god, Sarah I love it!" I gushed all girly-like. "I can't wait till you get tired of it so I can have it!"

"Oh, har har," she laughed rather sarcastically. "Is that how you look at all my clothes, you vulture?"

"Yeah, isn't it a great system?"

Today, two weeks after the Purchase, I'm lounging on the bed while Sarah packs in a flurry. Going through her mountainous clothes pile, she holds up the beautiful blue summer dress she bought two weeks ago at H&M, and said "Ann, do you want this?"

It was something beyond my wildest dreams. Two weeks, not even a month before she decided it wasn't "her"! I couldn't believe my luck. But all the same, I really couldn't believe she was giving up on it so soon.

"Are you sure, Sarah? But it's so pretty, how can you be tired of it already?"

"Really, you think so? Maybe I sh-"

"No no no, actually you're right, it's not so great! I'll take it!"

We both rolled on the bed laughing hysterically.

Hoo hoo, oh man, how lucky am I to have a twin sister with decent taste in clothes? Oh, and I'd like to note that she did not actually call me a vulture. But I thought it would have been funny if she did, so I took some liberty with the dialogue. Sue me silly!

On another note (G#), I have a four hour layover in Atlanta, GA tomorrow, yall!! God I love airports- as I was trying to tell someone earlier, but couldn't think of the right words, it's the hub of transition! And it's a great place to catch up on reading since there's not much else to do, so for that, I've got...Dun dun dun: Quantum Mechanics Demystified! I don't usually like the dummies/idiots/demystified books, but I figure it's better to know the dummy version than no version at all, right? Don't worry, I've got some good ole Sherlock Holmes adventures if I get too boggled down in whosits and whatsits and other weird physics.

Mysteries and Why I Love Sherlock Holmes

If anyone is looking for a quick, worthwhile read, might I recommend "The Westing Game" by Ellen Raskin? It's considered a children's book, but it's not "written for children" at all; rather, as the introduction says, it's written for the adult in every child. It's a great mystery, not predictable, yet written so that the reader can try a little sleuthing herself, really interesting characters, quirky, witty, touching, and not depressing (yay!). And for all you chess-lovers out there, it reads like a good game of chess. Although maybe I shouldn't advertise it like that since I don't really play chess, so how would I know. Reminiscent of "Clue" or the card game Mafia.

I'm sort of on a mystery book kick, I guess, because I'm rereading the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. I've forgotten how awesome he is, and Watson too. Their mystery adventures are interesting enough, but my affinity for the stories is more due to character attachment, and I am sure that if I had been alive in the UK when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Holmes, I would've been one of the 20,000 plus Brits who appeared in the streets in black, mourning this fictional character's death. It's so crazy how we can get so attached to imaginary folk.

What is it about his character that I like so much? Someone once told me about Nietzsche and his "amor fati", or "love one's fate" attitude toward life, and I see a bit of it in Holmes. His matter-of-fact acceptance of somber aspects of life and mankind, often with humor and maybe some well-justified arrogance, which I can hardly believe I'm writing because I used to think that there was no such thing as arrogance that can be justified. Maybe it's not justified, but I can definitely sympathize with him whenever he unravels the entire mystery himself and all the credit is given to one of the bumbling idiots of Scotland Yard who look on the genius Holmes as some eccentric, too theory-oriented, promising perhaps... "Life is dreary", he'd say so baldly, but it's not a fact that he ever sludges over, wondering why why why. He'll ponder over it from afar, like a curiosity, then throw himself into another mystery with passion and energy, or if there isn't one available presently, he'll take a pinch of snuff and scrape on his violin all through the night. Not that I endorse hard drugs, but well Watson got him to quit that eventually, didn't he? One minute he's filling Watson in on the latest develops of a case, and the next, he's insisting that the most important thing at the moment is lunch and miracle plays. And vice versa, one minute he's observing Londoners under the gaslights heading home from work, and philosophizing about the immortal spark that burns within each of them, and the next, he's hunting the grounds with his magnifying glass for cigar ashes and bootprints. He's terrifically adept at shifting gears and does so without concern for transitions or proper timing or other such restraining nonsense. His attitude of acceptance of all things is no better illustrated than in the scene where he and Doc Watson are chasing Jonathan Small and Tonga, who shoots a poisonous dart tip at them just as they shoot him down with their arms. Later they discover that the fatal dart had whizzed right between them, so they had been mere inches from death. Holmes merely smiles at it and shrugs "in his easygoing fashion", while Watson feels sick thinking of how close he came to death that night.

And Watson I like just as much because, among other reasons, he mirrors my admiration for his sleuth friend. Watson is who I am, and Sherlock Holmes is who I wish I could be.

Two Windows

S: Can you check the weather report?

A: Sure gimme a sec. (Firefox window pops up). It's raining.

We stare at the sunshine streaming through the living room window.

S: Well, better take an umbrella with me.

A: Stupid dysfunctional weather report add-on.

Morning Dialogue II: Ha, Hee, and Hoo

Angie: My stomach feels funny. It's telling knock-knock jokes. (Stifled giggling proceeds)

Sarah: (No response).

Angie: Isn't that funny? (Stifled giggling crescendos)

Sarah: Hrrrrrr.

Angie: Hahahaha! That was the best fake laugh ever! You sounded like you were retarded! Heeheehee! Oh man...*gasp*...can't breathe!...hooo...

Sarah: Pause...Oh I get it. Hey that's pretty funny! Hahaha!

Angie: Oh my god, you are retarded!

I give Sarah credit; she just improved my joke like 10-fold.

Morning Dialogue

Angie: I wonder what it's like to be raised by wolves.

Sarah: Huh?

Angie: I've been reading about feral children.

Sarah: Why is it that I never know what your talking about?

Heroes

I have a new hobby of keeping track each day of the number of encounters I have with nice people. This activity serves to uphold one of my two general views of humanity: In the best of lights, I see us as well-intentioned seekers of happiness with the ability to do astonishing things for creatures of such an insignificant physical stature, and where "crazy" means "colorful"; in the worst of lights, I see us as creatures to be pitied, and "crazy" just means you belong in the loony bin. I don't like to dwell on the latter view for purely selfish reasons- because it brings me down-, hence the new hobby.

Today's tally: 3 encounters with Seriously Nice people! Among them were the Garage Sale lady and the cashier at Jay's Deli. I was still raving about them when we reached Bruce's place to watch Heroes.

Heroes, is a great show not least because its characters are so all-encompassing and complex. I absolutely love the dynamic between Invisible Man and Peter Petrelli, where the former is the epitome of the jaded old hermit, and the latter is the hopeful humanist, the Little Engine That Couldn't But Kept On Chugging out of shear faith. Now, now he's just awesome. Oh man, is he awesome.

Another great thing about Heroes is that it totally plays into our fantasies that there's something out there bigger, cooler, more majestic than the daily 9 to 5 grind at a paper factory. One of my favorite quotes I heard today was when HRG (Horn-Rimmed Guy?) was interviewing for a job at the paper company:

Interviewer: So, how do you feel about paper?

HRG: Wildly enthusiastic.

At least, that's what I heard. Apparently, though, he had said "mildly", not "wildly". Personally, I like my version better. Anyway, we watched 7 episodes in a row before calling it a night. 6 more amazing hours to go!

Also, I haven't changed the look of this blog since I started it nearly 2.5 years ago, so I thought it was time for a change- just some minor ones, inspired by a fellow blogger.

The Dangers of Analogies, Exposed

First off, apologies to the Analogy Queen for the title of this post, but it was too good to pass up!

Next of all, I confess, I adore Karaoke Night at McGillan's. Nothing is more fun than bearing witness to a night of alcohol-fueled singing powered by a combination of 10% skill, 80% passion (and of course, the requisite 10% alcohol).

And without further ado, on to the crux of this post:

While at McGillan's tonight, I was talking to someone about "Tiny Dancer", about its part in the Almost Famous bus scene, and we realized after a while that we were talking about two different songs. I wasn't sure which one he had in mind. Neither was he for that matter. So I said I'd have to go look it up on the web when I got home. He replied with something about "innertubes".

Why was he suddenly talking about innertubing? I thought. Aloud of course. That's when I learned about Alaskan Senator Stevens' infamous intertubes speech (which was made last summer). The Jon Stewart references to it are particularly hilarious, so I'll quote them here, but read about the speech before you read the jokes!

Citations on The Daily Show

Stevens's speech was also ridiculed on seven episodes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart which featured clips of Stevens's speech, illustrated first by Stevens's photo and later by photos of Gabby Hayes and of Grampa Simpson. In the first instance, on July 12, 2006, Stewart compared him to "a crazy old man in an airport bar at 3:00 am", then going on to answer his question, "Why?" with, "Maybe it's because you don't seem to know jack shit about computers or the Internet — but that's okay — you're just the guy in charge of regulating it."

Stevens's "series of tubes" were again referenced in a July 24, 2006 interview with John McCain, where Stewart asked, "You know, privately, can you pull Senator Stevens aside and go, 'It's not really literally tubes'?", to which McCain replied, "I wouldn't want to disillusion him."^[14]

On August 8, 2006, The Daily Show again referenced Stevens's quote in regard to BP's troubles with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Correspondent Rob Corddry started to explain the trouble with the pipeline, then turned it over to a recording of Ted Stevens saying, "It's not a big truck. It's, it's a series of tubes!"

On October 2, 2006, correspondent John Oliver remarked, "Everyone knows that Congresspeople are assigned to committees based on their greatest weakness! Why else would Senator Ted Stevens, a man more comfortable in the horse and buggy era, wind up in charge of regulating the Internet... which, he believes, is a series of tubes... a series of tubes through which other Congressmen can reach in and fondle sixteen-year-old boys?" (referring to the Mark Foley scandal.)

On December 18, 2006, host Jon Stewart, in an interview with then Presidential candidate Tom Vilsack, referenced the quote while plugging Vilsack's website, stating "Is that one of them Internets? ... Go visit him on the series of tubes."

On January 23, 2007 when talking about presidential candidates using the Internet as a campaign tool in the 2008 election, Stewart said "The candidates are now turning to the interwebs, a series of tubes..."

By March 2007, Stewart's tube references had become shorter, but possibly more frequent, e.g., "intertubes," or "tubular interwebs."

I am le tired!

Here's why: I woke up in the morning today.

The past couple weeks, my schedule has consisted of: Wake up at noon. Translate. Shower. Eat. Translate. Develop Chronic Ass Pain (CAP) from sitting all day translating. Eat. Translate. See the sun rise. Sleep. And repeat.

I nearly forgot what morning looked like. Turns out, it's pretty much like the rest of the day, except slightly cooler and the sun's in a different position. No birds chirping or delicious aroma of bacon and eggs and johnnycakes wafting in from the kitchen (which happens to be in the living room in our case, which in turn happens to be where we've been sleeping since the bedroom has no air conditioning).

Anyway, so no birds, but I woke up at 9 AM and ran to the Irish memorial to say hi to my Irish friends, the McGillans and the O'Briens and the rest. I always rest in the shade created by the giant sculpture of the boat docking with all the emaciated Irish immigrants gazing at the land ahead in awe, speechless, as if they can't believe what they're seeing.

Of course, what they are really seeing is a small patch of grass, a couple of trees, and a bench with a homeless man snoozing on it. But they don't need to know that. Well, would it really crush them to know that? They've been on a diseased boat for months, tossing and swaying with the waves. I'm sure they'll get a kick out of anything that's solid and not blue. Anyway...they're not real. Sometimes I forget that.

Weather, Spelling, and Great Stories...A Threadless Post

Tomorrow is supposed to be BLAZING hot, near 100 degrees (Fahrenheit)!

By the way, it was the height of my spelling career when I got the spelling of "Fahrenheit" down pat. So I guess the height of my spelling career is placed somewhere between my junior and senior year in college. The world of spelling is an exciting one indeed.

Anyway, so I just got this idea while chatting with a friend, but I think it would be quite interesting and appropriate if we all went around tomorrow telling people, "You're on fire!" With feeling!

Speaking of fire, there are some really great stories in the Bible. The one about King David and his usurping son Adonius reads rather like an Arthurian legend, doesn't it?

Incident at the Park

A friend of mine (not of yours, mind you!) has this posted under his "About me" section in facebook:

I am from Kenya and UK. My left eye is shaped slightly differently to my right eye. My resting pulse is 58. Oh, I like brewed ice tea. yeaah.

I spend around 5 minutes each morning gazing at myself in the mirror.

I was one of 3 people on my team who could hit the ball.

It makes me laugh every time I read it (that's twice so far- maybe not a great sample size). I told him I might print it out and tape it to my mirror so that I could gaze at THAT every morning for 5 minutes. I think I actually might do it.

I had a convo with a BAC (Born-Again Christian) at the park today. BAC mentioned that the Holy Spirit had spoken to him while he was serving his 17 years in prison. I was in two minds about this: On the one hand, if this God/religion thing is what it takes to keep you from crime, than geez, by all means, believe it! On the other hand, now you've got it in your head that other people need saving too. Is it OK to perpetuate ignorance and talltales as a method of eradicating crime? As we were sitting there talking about religion and God (separate things?) I was reminded of the beginning scene of "Master and Margarita", where these two guys were arguing about whether God and Satan existed, and Satan was standing there going, "This is most interesting: they are arguing about whether or not I exist." Hehe.

The Old Young Hillary

Here's an interesting article on Hillary Clinton. It's interesting to note that there is a common set of questions, thoughts, and experiences that every individual- from me to you to Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton- go through in life. It's comforting on the one hand because maybe that is what life is about- each individual getting a chance to search within and around themselves for answers and meaning before passing away into oblivion (or whatever).

On the other hand, one look at the present (perhaps the Pres-id-ent) Hillary Clinton has me hoping that that is where our similarities end. See what politics has done to her. Already, in the letter, I could sense a load of negativity and anger- although I guess it's not fair to judge from the excerpts in the article. And life hasn't exactly been kind to her what with her being cheated on in front of the whole world. It's frightening to see what can happen to a person who used to have the same thoughts and questions and desires as you.

I was just thinking: Harry had the same thoughts about Voldemort. Ooh, Harry Potter parallels, how illuminating!

The Connery Effect

I just saw my first Indiana Jones movie- The Last Crusade. (Yes, that is the 3rd installment of the franchise.) Two thumbs up for its hilarious antics, great, comical action sequence from the very beginning, good one-liners, and of course, for the multiple demonstrations of the Connery Effect. For instance:

"Did I ever tell you to do your homework, go to bed, wash behind your ears? I gave you privacy! I taught you...SHELF-RELIANCE!"

Hehe. Kinda takes away from the heat of the moment when all your S's come out sounding like SH's.

The Limited Power of Analogies

Analogies can only take your argument so far. Actually, what I want to say is, analogies don't further argument, they merely serve to convey ideas. In other words, analogies contribute nothing to the truth value of a statement or an idea; they can only aid in the understanding of it. For instance, I found the following excerpt from an article in the Times about abstinence:

“You have to look at why sex was created,” Eric Love, the director of the East Texas Abstinence Program, which runs Virginity Rules, said one day, the sounds of Christian contemporary music humming faintly in his Longview office. “Sex was designed to bond two people together.”

To make the point, Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”

Great analogy, by all means, Mr. Love. Not perfect, but I see what he's trying to say. But I just hope people don't accept his view as the "correct" view solely based on the quality of his analogy. Like some kinds of tape don't ever lose their stickiness, Mr. Love, hehe.

The set of analogies that can be made is a lot bigger than the set of analogies that should be made.

The Importance of Proofreading and Chicken Tales

Yesterday, I was translating a portion of the book talking about the basis of Halakha (Jewish religious law). The story told was about how one year, the eve of "Paque" fell on the Sabbath, and so they had to figure out whether "Paque" took precedence over the Sabbath.

Today, after a good night's sleep, I realized that I translated "Paque" as Easter instead of Passover. Which doesn't sound like a big deal, really until you realize that Jews definitely don't celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Sometimes you forget that Easter wasn't originally a day for celebrating bunnies and going on Easter egg hunts.

Little fact about eggs: The largest chicken egg was over 12 inches around the long axis, and 9 around the short. That poor chicken. There are some other interesting facts about chickens on this page. Here is a particularly funny chicken story:

[UPI, Cairo, Egypt, 31 Aug. 1995] - Six people drowned Monday while trying to rescue a chicken that had fallen into a well in southern Egypt. An 18 year old farmer was the first to descend into the 60-foot well. He drowned, apparently after an undercurrent in the water pulled him down, police said. His sister and two brothers, none of whom could swim well, went in one by one to help him, but also drowned. Two elderly farmers then came to help, but they apparently were pulled by the same undercurrent. The bodies of the six were later pulled out of the well in the village of Nazlat Imara, 240 miles south of Cairo. The chicken was also pulled out. It survived.

I think the article forgot to mention that the chicken laid gold eggs.

Listening To...

Current music favorites:

1. Aventura- great music to cook to!

2. Amelie soundtrack- puts me in another country, another century; listen for:
(a) bicycle wheel at the end of "La Dispute"
(b) the tinkly musical box music that sneaks in about 2 minutes into "Soir de fete"- it took me forever to find which song that was in! The transition is absolutely seamless! It's my favorite part of the whole soundtrack.

3. Pink Floyd (just...great; Comfortably Numb, Coming back to life, Another Brick in the Wall. Listen to that guitar wail!)

4. Arcade Fire- good indie rock; Crown of Love is my favorite; Neighborhood 1 and 4, Intervention...I love the Canadian radio host's voice at the end: "If that doesn't git yeh man, if that doesn't git yeh somewhere spaycial!...Whhhhwww...feel sorry for yeh"

Dreams

There's an interesting article on dreams in this week's Science Times. I've always been fascinated by this subject because for one, it's an interesting phenomenon in itself (is it really just evolutionary spandrel or did it evolve of its own accord? What are it's (dis)advantages? How does it happen? Well, definitely, in order to know more about dreaming, we have to know more about consciousness and memory), and also because I have a better ability than most to recall my dreams, and/or I have more vivid dreams in general, and so I guess I dwell on them more (Even though Dumbledore says "it does not do to dwell on dreams." Of course, he was talking about a different sort of dreaming...).

Upon waking up after a vivid dream, I almost always try to figure out why I dreamed about this happening, and why this person popped up in my dream because it's my firm belief that there's a logical explanation for each event/person involved, at least in my case. I don't not believe in prophetic dreams (especially after hearing Jin's stories), but I know I'm no psychic, nor am I magically connected to a certain Dark Wizard, and I definitely don't believe in all that Freudian nonsense about daughters wanting their fathers and whatnot.

What I've learned from analyzing my own dreams is that the basic process is: my mind takes a kernel of reality (whether it is a particularly intense emotion, eg: desire or guilt, or a person that I thought of in passing the day before- the kernel is almost always taken from the reality of the day before- and promptly forgot about) and projects it into a full-blown movie using characters/events/places/feelings from my past experiences and thoughts, that I suppose get all jumbled up in my brain as it relaxes into sleep-mode. It's like a kernel of reality getting tossed into a box of old photos, my memory file, and shaken up like a Wendy's salad. Of course, this describes the process of only one kind of dream. I have others that stay more in the current, like when I used to work at the bookstore full-time, once, I dreamed that I came down the escalator with a pile of books in my arms to find three of my co-workers at the info-desk trying to juggle pencils on their noses. Wait, was that a dream? Hm...

So, anyway, in this sense, dreams are like myths; they are "truth-bearing tales," always containing a kernel of truth dressed up in nonsense from your jumbled memory.

Some observations about my dreams:

Whenever I make a big move, I constantly dream about the people I leave behind for at least the first couple weeks. Also, childhood friends crop up in my dreams more often than usual. This time around, I haven't even moved yet (about 2 months to go), but those dreams have already begun.

Eating a lot of food right before falling asleep gives me ultra-vivid, action-packed dreams. Garfield had it right: "No more pizza after midnight!" (But the cause can't be a surplus of glucose in the brain because the food hasn't been processed yet...something about your digestive system being seriously active? I dunno...)

Some people are more prone to flying dreams than others. I'm in the latter category.

In high school, I experimented with this deep-breathing technique right before falling asleep, and all my dreams were extremely serene and happy. Like I would dream about stretching on a sandy beach, blue skies, ocean, gulls in the distance, the works.

A lot of aspects about dreams and dreaming (like, why I dream about the people I left behind) is pretty easily explained- elementary, my dear Watson- but on the whole, the phenomenon is still shrouded in mystery because it delves into the field of consciousness and memory, which we really don't know much about yet, though that's slowly changing.

Sympathy for Raskolnikov

Have you ever felt so angry at someone that you just want to strangle them? Like, really, physically beat the shit out of them? I don't remember much about the book "Crime & Punishment," which I read in high school English class, which was (scarily enough) years ago, but I do remember feeling more than a bit sympathetic for the main character.

With that said, something that I don't understand- and maybe it's not fair to say this, but here goes: one thing I don't understand is when black people are racist. Of all people, I think they should understand what it's like to be treated as inferiors just because of the way they look. Right?? But even as I was wondering about this illogism (what? It's a word in French!), I realized that that's exactly the problem- a black person who treats Muslims and Asians like shit, calling them damn foreigners, saying "I hate it when they come in speaking 'their language' (when they are clearly speaking English), yelling "go back to fucking Korea", or acting as if we can't operate a simple computerized sandwich ordering machine when it's clear that it's the machine that is broken, not the orderer's brain, a person like that, no matter their color, is clearly not a rational being. One might even call them crazy, or fucked in the head, and there are certainly enough of those kinds of people here in Philly, so I guess it makes sense that we have so many of these incidents...

Point being, racism, bigotry, bias, whatever, is inherently unreasonable, and although this point is not meant to help victims of that sort of injustice feel much better, at least now we know it's because they're not as smart as us. But then again, does "more rational" mean "smarter"? I can see now why education is so important for society, and this is a point reiterated over and over and over again (I guess that's why they call it a "theme") in the book, "Three Cups of Tea": educated minds incite rational behavior. It may not be a cure to the world's peace problems, but a person who is taught to think logically from a young age is less likely to believe baseless statements like "All Muslims are terrorists" or "Americans are the devil incarnate" or "Iraq is the axis of ev..." for some reason, I just lost the desire to finish this sentence.

One of Life's Amazing Coincidences (#286)

I'm going to let y'all in on a little secret that will brighten up your day by a factor of 10 spoonfuls of sugar:

In Hector Berlioz's musical piece entitled, "Damnation de Faust", the interval lying between seconds 37 and 39.5 sound EXACTLY like the music in that scene in Mary Poppins where Jane and Michael are frantically running away from the bank and around the dark alleys of London.

I swear, this discovery is on par with that really famous equation in math that contains all the important constants.

You Know What's Creepy?

The sound of the ice cream man in the middle of the night. Somehow, the darkness turns the cutesy tinkly music into something sinister. It's like children in horror movies.

Pot Calls Kettle Black

I just realized that I've been called "special" several times by a bipolar co-worker who's spent time in the "loony bin" and used to see a gaunt, bloody, death-like version of herself following her around everywhere. Not quite sure what to make of that.

Berlioz the Romantic

"Which of these two powers, love or music, can elevate man to the sublimest heights? Why separate them? They are the two wings of the soul."

PS Meets Marvel

This one made me burst out laughing like a cannon. Good thing I was in the privacy of my own home.

Update: Okay, I just showed Sarah the link, and she had a very tame reaction compared to mine, so maybe it won't be that funny to other people. In fact, there was no reaction whatsover for several long seconds. Then she realized that there was nothing to get and went back to reading Harry Potter saying, "I like the Harry Potter one better."

Labyrinth- The Quintessential '80s Movie

But I liked it anyway- surprise surprise!

So Labyrinth, starring David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly is chock-full of lessons, like "life's not fair," "don't take things for granted," "friends are everything," and so on. But I think the most important lesson we must take away from this Sesame Street/Wizard of Oz/LOTR/Alice in Wonderland- like film is: Never trip on LSD! Lest you fantasize about being infatuated with David Bowie in tight gray leggings. Ay, what a nightmare!

I Spy a Sty in My Eye

Sometimes, I forget that I only have two eyes, and no replacements. Thanks to my disregard for proper eyecare, my left eye is now swollen and lazy-looking, and according to Sarah's research, the symptoms indicate the formation of a sty within my eyelid. YAY. It doesn't seem like too big a deal as long as I don't pop it on accident, but I was scanning the list of sty-related problems of a more serious sort:

-The eye is swollen shut.

-Redness appears around the entire eye.

-You have any change or disturbance in you vision.

-Swelling lasts for more than 3 weeks.

-The sty or styes come back or bleed.

-Your eyelashes fall out.

-Pus or thick discharge continues to drain from the eye.

-You have a fever higher than 100.5.

-You have excessive persistent tearing.

-You have significant pain.

and for some reason, of all the serious problems listed, it was the one about the eyelashes falling out that freaked me out. There is something distinctly horrifying about the possibility that one morning, you'll rub your eyes upon waking up and find all your eyelashes stuck to the back of your hand.

But now my curiosity is getting the better of me: I wonder how I would look with no eyelashes? Would it make much of a difference, given that my eyelashes are of inconsequential length in the first place? Hm.

I've always envied those with eyelashes so long that they make air currents when they blink and necessitate the use of curling irons instead of plain old eyelash curlers.

Funniest Facebook Group EVER!

NAME: Dora the Explorer is soo an illegal immigrant...

DESCRIPTION: Ok, so here's the deal... If you need the explanations they're all around you...

1) She speaks spanish... she speaks spanish perfectly... what is she like...5? Her backpack even speaks spanish perfectly!

2) That backpack of hers has EVERYTHING in it! And we're talking everything! Life support, water/food, clothing for any weather, ropes, grappling hooks, shoes.... i mean c'mon!

3) She's carrying a freaking ZOO with her! I mean, she has a monkey, an band of insects, a bajillion other animals! Really! What kind of legal immigrant has that many pets!?

4) She's always on an "adventure" to transport a "package" to some destination and is always being stalked by a person trying to take that package... i mean... really, Swiper is so obviously some sort of border patrol person trying to collect evidence of Dora's entire narcotics trafficking buisness

The evidence is so obvious and around you guys! And they're even poisoning our little children with them... Who wants our toddlers to grow up knowing spanish before english?! Even if it's the USA...

ONE MEMBER'S POST:

"OMG..I had no idea this group existed. My 2 yr old daughter LOVES dora and her only words come from the show. seriously, her first word was back pack. I'm not kidding. She says abre and hola and zapato and baila and she can name all the characters on the show. It's so sad. My boyfriend and I have always joked about how dora has cocaine in her backpack and is smuggling it and she must be having sex with boots. Wow. Thank you for this facebook group!"
-Mother of a Dora Fan

Where's the Blimp?

I was listening to "Strength and Honor" from the Gladiator soundtrack, and suddenly I thought of that scene in Cinderella where the mice are trying to get past Lucifer the mean, fat cat.

Is that weird?

There's a little blurb in the Science Times about how scientists are ready to put the Large Hadron Collider (named Atlas) into action, possibly recreating the the birth of the universe over and over and over again- 30 million times per second to be exact. It's also possible that the monster machine won't produce anything special, in which case the credibility/rep/etc. of the scientists involved will be annihilated, they probably won't receive funding again for such an endeavor anywhere near our lifetime, and the hope of finding evidence for certain theories will be lost for a long time.

So nothing too exciting, in other words.

Shouldn't this stuff be advertized by a blimp flying a banner, at the very least? I guess they can't count the chickens before they hatch.

PS Meets HP

What's your greatest fear? I completely empathize with you, man!

MMA-Worthy Idea?

I want to build a bunch of random objects like chairs, birds and hairdryers out of playdoh, put them on display, and call it "Plato's ideals".

5-Second Rule!

An awesome one-page article on a scientific study of the 5-second rule. I'm pretty blase about eating stuff off the floor. A little dirt don't hurt, and I'm sure I've ingested much dirtier things than a few colonies of bacteria in my lifetime, and see, I managed to reach the age of 23. But of course if it fell on the Septa bus floor for example, or on the floor of the bookstore bathroom, I ain't that stupid- that shit's staying on the floor.

Happiness to Thoreau

“Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder…”– Thoreau

Aphorisms

Beauty is only skin-deep; underneath that skin, everyone is fucking crazy.

The real question is, is it true that the more beautiful and perfect you look on the outside, the more fucked you are on the inside, because it takes so much effort to maintain the physical semblance of sanity and perfection? Or is it that "everyone is fucking crazy", but some are so fucked inside that the fuckedness hidden underneath the skin oozes out like puss through the pores, thus making it visible to the naked eye?

"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well...."

~Magritte, about his painting, "Son of Man"

If I Were a Dictator

Forget ordering mass genocide and hoarding all the wealth and food. If I were a dictator, I would standardize melons. Honeydew, cantaloupe, golden melon, watermelon, (just) melons- there's just too goddamn many of them! And papayas are melons too! Unbelievable...

When life gives you melons, make melonade.

Melon is Elvish for "friend."

If Physicists Were Weight-Loss Specialists

You know what's a great way to lose weight? Go down an elevator and have someone cut the cable. You weigh...zero pounds, congratulations!

Surgeon General's warning: Weight-loss using the above method is temporary, and excessive weight re-gain is highly probable upon impact when landing.

If Physicists Were Bullies

"Your mama's so dense, light bends around her."

~Ouch. I've definitely heard that one on the playground.

I just love how they have a page on Wikipedia for "yo momma" jokes, which got popular, apparently, in the early '90s.

Words of Wisdom

"If there’s a defect in basic cell biology, it might be shared by other cells. So we can learn a lot about complicated organisms from studying very simple cells like yeast."

~ from an interview with biologist Susan Lindquist

Since things usually evolve from simple to complex, then it does make sense that if something's wrong with a basic function, then the problem occurred early on and continued throughout. Kind of like when you make a calculation error early on in a complicated math problem, but you don't realize it until you reach the solution, so every line thereafter is wrong (carries the error).

Tragedy or Comedy?

1. There's a lot of bad shit going down around the world. But it's always been like that, right? To me, though, the Virginia Tech massacre seems all the more tragic because a lot of them were so young. Dying is awful, but it's worse when it happens to people who haven't had a chance to do everything they want to do. (Tragedy)

2. What's with the Koreans Gone Wild? (Hm, I just thought of an inappropriate spoof* of Girls Gone Wild videos- Comedy). First there's that second year Penn law school student, John Cho, who barged into his downstairs neighbors' apmt door and fired 15 rounds because he thought they were commie spies, or something. Then this Cho Seung-hi guy. Two don't mean a thang, though.

*Word History: We are indebted to a British comedian for the word spoof. Sometime in the 19th century Arthur Roberts (1852-1933) invented a game called Spoof, which involved trickery and nonsense. The first recorded reference to the game in 1884 refers to its revival. It was not long before the word spoof took on the general sense "nonsense, trickery," first recorded in 1889. The verb spoof is first recorded in 1889 as well, in the sense "to deceive." These senses are now less widely used than the noun sense "a light parody or satirical imitation," first recorded in 1958, and the verb sense "to satirize gently," first recorded in 1927.

3. I recently experienced some drama-trauma myself, when my ipod went missing for a full 4 days. (A tale for some later time.) But I got it back yesterday, and when I went home, I scrapped all my evening plans, hooked up my ipod (my baby!) to Sarah's speakers, plopped down on the living room floor and listened to glorious music until well past midnight. For the record, I did, in fact, croon "dear ipod, I've missed you so!" not once, but twice! With feeling! (Near-tragedy)

4. Sanjaya making it into the top 7 in American Idol. (Comedy)

5. Sanjaya singing country. (A Tragedy for the Country music industry, a Comedy for the rest of us)

6. Sanjaya winning American Idol (Tragedy).

7. Ryan Seacrest's look this season just screams "MINI-PAT SAJAK!" They should get him a wheel. (Comedy)

8. A giraffe with a fear of heights. (Tragi-Comedy)

Dialogue

Theme: Insults

Scene 1:

Joey: You know what I like about you? No matter how much I insult you, you are unflappable. You're like the ship that sails serenely through the fog.

Angie: Wow, I've never heard that analogy before- I like it! How does it go again?

Joey: Yeah, you're like a ship, see there's this thick fog, you can't see anything, and you just sail like a ship through the fog, completely unfeathered.

Angie: So...I'm the fog.

Joey: Yeah, see, so there's this ship, it's sailing through a thick fog, it's night and you can't see a thing, but you just sail on through it

Angie: So...I'm the night.

Joey: The knight in shining armor. See now, it's raining, and it's foggy, and there's this ship that's sailing on the water, and the knight's armor gets all wet from the rain.

Angie: So...I'm the rain.

Joey: Yeah, except it's strange because you're carrying an umbrella. But it's one of those umbrellas that, when you open it, it rains on the inside, but you only see those in cartoons.

Scene 2:

(At the bookstore. My co-workers and I are standing around at the info-desk being our usual useful, hardworking selves.)

Karen: ...blah blah blah Angie blah blah blah...

Molly: The problem is, it's really hard to insult her because she just doesn't listen.

Me: ...What?

Science Times

This week's Science Times is a gold mine. I sat at the bookstore yesterday and read it cover-to-cover. They had this huge theme, "Desire", which caught my interest, sure, but the article that was supposed to be a main feature was kind of a let-down in my opinion because a lot of the discussed "discoveries" were common sense, trivial, "duh" discoveries that everyone and her mom already knows. I know that that is part of science too- proving the obvious facts through the scientific method, but I hate it when researchers make a big deal when they discover that "oh my god, people tend to like their own personal space," or "sexual arousal is linked with emotional/inner states, not just physical for a high percentage of women." One result they found particularly interesting was that straight men are only attracted to women, whereas straight women, though they say they prefer men, are nonetheless attracted to other women. Well, yeah, that's because a typical woman's body, compared to a man's, is just damn sexier, more beautiful with its curves, not just an angular box like a man's; a typical woman's body is simply more aesthetically pleasing. We'll see how long it takes for that to become a hypothesis.

The other main feature, on the other hand, was definitely not a let-down. Some interesting points I found were:

-all fetuses are female by default! At least until a certain gene on the Y chromosome, if present, diverts the reproductive tissue from the ovarian-forming pathway (Picture a stick figure chromosome man dressed in a clown costume jumping up and down with his arms raised, shouting "hey, over here! Lookit me, lookit me! Follow me, and grow some balls!) into the pathway that makes the fetus man up.

-baby boys whose dicks are accidentally cut off due to a circumcision job gone south (maybe not south enough), who are raised as girls, are still attracted to girls

-based on a study of twins, they found genetics definitely plays a key role in determining sexual orientation, especially in males- not an amazing revelation in itself, but then one has to wonder how homosexuality, if it is genetic, survived in the genes since homosexual males tend to have 1/5 the number of kids as their straight counterparts.

The article discussed the possibility that either

1) it's a byproduct gene (just like how our penchant for believing in a higher being could simply be an evolutionary byproduct of another trait) that just came along for the ride, attached to some other actually beneficial gene. Picture now, Schwarzenegger going for a motorcycle ride with his son sitting next to him in a side-car. (They crashed, but they survived!) I just learned of this incident from my current annotating task.) , or

2) it's explained by the fraternal birth order effect, which says that males with older brothers have a higher chance of being gay. Something about more testosterone being in the womb for the next birth. Each older brother increases the odds by a whopping 33%! Suddenly, while reading about this theory, I couldn't help but marvel at my straight friend Joe from high school, who had 6 or 7 older brothers (and very old parents, I might add); Joe's a walking talking miracle. A bit of a mama's boy, yes. Oh and just so I don't get shot, by "miracle", I mean a statistical miracle.

-a lot of brain-related genes are on the X chromosome. Why? A possible explanation discussed in the article is:

1) Guys only have one X chromosome, so mutations on it have more of an effect, leading to fast selection.

2) Girls prefer smarter guys. (I guess this has been true since the beginning of man, is the assumption.)

Coupling facts 1 & 2 together, any advantageous brain-related mutation on the X chromosome is going to be snatched up quickly, resulting in a lot of brain-related genes on the X chromosome. I grappled with this for a while. For some reason- maybe because I haven't had bio since high school- I had a hard time understanding the connection, but I think it makes sense now. I was like, "Why do they keep saying 'fast selection'? What does that mean?"

Also, an article about the flight pattern of fruit flies, which sounds mundane at first, but they're like fractals! No matter how close or far you watch their flight pattern, it looks the same (fly straight, make a right angle turn, fly straight, make a right angle turn, rinse and repeat). And why would anyone care? Because next time you're searching for a needle in a haystack with some friends in the stix, you'll remember this article and suggest to your friends that maybe the best, most optimal way to search isn't by combing the fields in straight lines, but in a crazy zig-zag pattern! Take a leaf out of nature's book- a lot of times, it turns out to be a pretty good guide, you know?

Here is an interesting quote from an article I found while searching for the fruit flies one:

"NO longer content with dissecting tissues, analyzing proteins and breeding fruit flies, an increasingly diverse group of scientists has decided that the best way to study life is to make some of their own.

They are creating a field called artificial life, [this is where I stopped reading to check the date of the article- September 29, 1987] mixing the impulses of biology with the tools of computation. By looking beyond the usual materials of life - beyond the familiar biochemistry of earthly animals and plants - they hope to capture its spirit: the animated, the energetic, the replicating, the evolved."

Wow, imagine how crazy that must have sounded way back in the eighties.

And last, an article about the discovery of the oldest depiction of a fish. Guess what kind of fish it is- an Atlantic salmon. That's how accurate and detailed the 25,000-year-old depiction was; they could actually make-out the particular type of fish! Speaking of salmon, it's cool how such a simple thing as wearing the same jewelry as the rest of your tribe could have played a part in ensuring the evolution of you and me- modern modern man.

Last Words

"Don't cry, I need all my courage to die at twenty."

~the last words of Evariste Galois

Poop Talk

You know what's a laxative? When you only have one bathroom, and your roommate is using it. Somehow your stomach knows...

Dictators Aren't Below Good Ol' Name-Calling

Okay, so he didn't call him "butthead" or "nincompoop" which would have been AWESOME, but in the past, Venezuelen President Hugo Chavez has called Bush a "donkey," a "drunkard," a "coward," and best of all, "Mr. Danger." Oh wait, it gets better! Now he calls our dear jefe "El Diablo." Hee hee! Well, he does have the cowboy accent and probably the boots to go with.

Also, last year, Chavez showed a keen interest in having a biographical film made starring Oliver Stone as the Venezuelen president. Apparently, Stone passed up the offer (of a lifetime).

And once, he rebutted criticism from Condoleeza Rice by suggesting she had a crush on him.

What a colorful character. Evil, maybe, but colorfully so.

Joey's Trick

Something Joey showed us at work one day:

eyeye

(double vision!)

The Hazards of Dance

I split my pants dancing to Beastie Boys yesterday.

"Kickin lyrics right to your brain, so when you hear that sound you'll be right as rain!"

Help, I need a needle and thread.

Stash the 'Stache

Weird. There's this Arabic looking guy who looks as if he hasn't been in school in quite a few years in the computer lab who is looking through facebook. What business might he have on that site? Maybe it's the moustache that's throwing me way off in my estimate of his age.

I've got a thing against moustaches- they skeeve me out. They look so...child-molester-ish. At the very least they make guys look way older than their actual age, and not in a good way. Older and shadier. The only man who ever looked decent with a moustache was Omar Shariff in Dr. Zhivago, and even then...it was still unsettling.

Also, when will I get "too old" to keep a facebook account? Will my profile be up there forever, forever displaying my activities as "high-tailing it from heaven, burning in hell", like some weird time-capsule or info-age diary or photo album? Oooh, thinking about such a distant future kinda freaks me out. But not as much as moustaches do.

Again With the Drama!

Alias, Heroes, Boston Legal,...and now Sopranos! I've recently gotten into this awesome HBO series. The writing (lots and lots of dialogue) is just terrific. It's comedy, it's very subtly dramatic, there some action, but only because it's a show about the Mob, but it's the writing that makes it a keeper. And also, the characters don't get friggin annoying like they do on 24. 24 is OK, but it's all action, no depth, no wit, no light moments, no funny (yes, it's a noun in my book), and the characters- you just wanna kill them because all their annoying habits and stupid things they choose to do.

I watched the whole second disc (4 episodes, folks!) of the first season of the Sopranos last night after I got home, and that's pretty much what my nights are gonna be like for the next two weeks so that I can take full advantage of my Netflix free 2-week trial...except when I'm in Florida, I guess. Netflix is awesome, folks- get it! I urge you strongly! You've got almost nothing to lose, no tricks, no fine print! And I like their commercials where the family comes home to find all these movie characters in their living room.

(The title of this post is a line from one of the episodes.)

Anthony Jr.: "Is it true that the Chinese invented spaghetti?"

Tony: "Think about it: Why would people who eat with sticks...invent something that you need a fork to eat?"

(Of course, I almost always eat pasta with chopsticks if it's available, with sriracha sauce dribbled all over it. But it's still funny!)

"They're called Hasidim, Paulie."

Paulie: "Hasidim, but I don't believe 'em."

Happy 3.1415926535... Day!

In honor of this special day, a quick poll:

What's everyone's favorite pie?

I love pecan pie- without the pecans.

Caveat

Logical validity doesn't imply truth.

A Link About the Neuro-Law Link

Another great Times magazine article about neuroscience and the law, which taps into my recent surge of interest in the brain.

Divination, presently only a "woolly" and "imprecise" (that would be McGonagall talking) subject taught at Hogwarts, could become a science once we find out more about our brain! In one study, they could predict when the subject was thinking about places vs people by studying the way the brain lit up. That is crazy and cool.

In preparation for the upcoming release of HP 7, I've decided to relate all blog matters to the magical world of Harry Potter. It's like Lent preceding Easter except way more exciting! And I don't have to give up chocolate, which seems to be my latest food obsession.

Yesterday, while I was working at the bookstore, I ate like 7 different kinds of chocolate (cookies, doughnuts, bars, etc.), and was bouncing off the walls. Plus the sun was shining. WowowoWW no one should ever let me eat that much chocolate in one day ever again. I felt like I could fly I was so happy, and also, I felt kind of trapped too because my excess energy and zest for life was bounded by my present surroundings and situation and by not having any wings dammit. Like the only match for my mood would have been flying to the moon on a magic carpet...with an Aladdin. Hmmm this sounds familiar.

It's That 3-Letter Word Again

What does God see when he looks in the mirror?

Dog. Here puppy, puppy!

Unless he is looking into the Mirror of Erised. Hm...what would God see in the Mirror of Erised? What does He desire more than anything else in the whole universe (or multiverse)? Maybe He wants a body. Or world peace. Or a piece of cake.

More importantly, what does Dumbledore see when he looks into the Mirror of Erised? We all know it's not really socks.

Darwin's God

an interesting article from the Times magazine. I especially liked the part where they talk about "spandrel" (page 3), a term coined by some famous evolutionary biologist and his colleague that is used to describe "a trait that has no adaptive value of its own."

Sometimes there is no "why" or "what for"; it just is.

Say No to...What?

I find myself growing more and more averse to mob movements the more I read about them. Consider the following comment made by a partaker of a demonstration following the release of the Mehlis report "implicating high-level Syrian officials in Hariri's death":

"We are protesting against the Mehlis report because it is untrue," said Marwa Jelaylat, 17. "We were very surprised to hear these accusations against our government."

The first thought that popped into my head after reading the word "untrue" was What does she know? She's a 17-year-old Syrian common citizen for crying out loud. Gee, now I sound like one of those baddies on tv that pushes the heroine out of the way saying "get outta the way little girl, you don't know what you're doing, go play with your dolls." But come on. How can she just say that a report presented by the U.N. is untrue, and with such conviction?

What percentage of individuals in a protest crowd really truly understand what they are fighting for or against, I wonder? Maybe that's not the point. Maybe the point is to get passionate about some issue or another, even if the stance is chosen mostly out of ignorance or misinformation. At least they care enough to shout themselves hoarse and raise picket signs.

Revelations:

The scariest book in the Bible.

My life is full of epiphanies and revelations. Of course, what's a revelation for one can be mundane fact for another, hardly worth an eyebrow-raise, if you have the ability to raise one eyebrow at a time. I myself can only do it with the left brow.

...On another note: Mandarin and Cantonese are known as Chinese "dialects", but they are completely different languages really. How are they different? Well, if you ask a linguist, you'll get a really convoluted reply about tones, syllable-final sounds, merging, phonological change, and so on.

A much simpler answer would be: Cantonese is ugly, while Mandarin is not. So if you ever hear someone (most likely a guy) say adamantly: "Chinese is hot!" and maybe even furnish you with an example involving that girl in Rush Hour who's in every other hot-Asian-chick role, then most likely, he is talking about Mandarin.

Absolutes

Random internet find #47:

"When your mama says you should never run with a sharp stick, she was probably right. Of course, if you don't, you'll never win the Great Sharp Stick Race!"

Learning from the best

Whatever happened to those educational cartoons of yore? And now, the Warner Bros (and Warner sister!) present: the U.S. presidents!

Note: the astericks indicate the original lyrics
Note: the prophetic nature of the bolded verse

Yakko: Heigh ho, do you know
The names of the U.S. residents
Who then became the presidents
And got a view from the White House loo
Of Pennsylvania Avenue?

Wakko: George Washington was the first, you see
He once chopped down a cherry tree
Dot : President number two would be
John Adams and then number three

* Yakko: George Washington was the first, you see
* He once chopped down a cherry tree
* Dot : President number two would be
* John Adams and then number three

Yakko: Tom Jefferson stayed up to write
The Declaration late at night
So he and his wife had a great big fight
And she made him sleep on the couch all night

* Yakko: Tom Jefferson stayed up to write
* The Constitution late at night
* So he and his wife had a great big fight
* And she made him sleep on the couch all night

Wakko: James Madison never had a son
And he fought the War of 1812
Dot : James Monroe's colossal nose
Was bigger than Pinocchio's

Yakko: John Quincy Adams was number six
And it's Andrew Jackson's butt he kicks
So Jackson learns to play politics
Next time he's the one that the country picks

Dot : Martin Van Buren, number eight
For a one-term shot as Chief of State
Yakko: William Harrison, how do you praise?
That guy was dead in thirty days

Wakko: John Tyler, he liked country folk
Dot : And after him came President Polk
Yakko: Zachary Taylor liked to smoke
His breath killed friends whenever he spoke

Wakko: Eighteen fifty, really nifty
Millard Fillmore's in
Yakko: Young and fierce was Franklin Pierce
The man without a chin

Dot : Follows next a period spannin'
Four long years with James Buchanan
Then the South starts shootin' cannon
And we've got a civil war
YW+D : A war, a war down south in Dixie

Yakko: Up to bat comes old Abe Lincoln
Dot : There's a guy who's really thinkin'
Wakko: Kept the United States from shrinkin'
Saved the ship of state from sinkin'

Dot : Andrew Johnson's next
He had some slight defects
Wakko: Congress each
Would impeach
Dot : And so the country now elects

Yakko: Ulysses Simpson Grant
Who would scream and rave and rant
Wakko: While drinking whiskey
Although risky
'Cause he'd spill it on his pants

Yakko: It's eighteen seventy-seven
And the Democrats would gloat
But they're all amazed when Rutherford Hayes
Wins by just one vote

Dot : James Garfield, someone really hated
'Cause he was assassinated
Wakko: Chester Arthur gets instated
Four years later, he was traded

Dot : For Grover Cleveland, really fat
Elected twice as a Democrat
Then Benjamin Harrison; after that
It's William McKinley up to bat

Yakko: Teddy Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill
Wakko: And President Taft, he got the bill
Yakko: In 1913 Woodrow
YW+D : Wil...
...son takes us into World War One

Yakko: Warren Harding next in line
Dot : It's Calvin Coolidge; he does fine
Wakko: And then in nineteen twenty-nine
The market crashes, and we find

* Yakko: Warren Harding, he does fine
* Dot : It's Calvin Coolidge next in line
* Wakko: And then in nineteen twenty-nine
* The market crashes, and we find

Yakko: It's Herbert Hoover's big debut
He gets the blame and loses to
Dot : Franklin Roosevelt, president who
Helped us win in World War Two

Wakko: Harry Truman, weird little human
Serves two terms and when he's done
Yakko: It's Eisenhower who's got the power
From fifty-three to sixty-one

Dot : John Kennedy had Camelot
Then Lyndon Johnson took his spot
Yakko: Richard Nixon, he gets caught
And Gerald Ford fell down a lot

* Dot : John F. Kennedy, he gets shot
* So Lyndon Johnson takes his spot
* Yakko: Richard Nixon, he gets caught
* And Gerald Ford fell down a lot

Wakko: Jimmy Carter liked campaign trips
Yakko: And Ronald Reagan's speeches' scripts
All came from famous movie clips
And President Bush said "read my lips"

Dot : Now in Washington D.C.
Wakko: There's Democrats and the G.O.P.
Yakko: But the ones in charge are plain to see
Dot : The Clintons, Bill and Hillary

* Dot : Now in Washington D.C.
* Wakko: There's Democrats and the G.O.P.
* Yakko: But the one in charge is plain to see
* Dot : It's Clinton, first name Hillary

Yakko: The next President to lead the way
Well, it just might be yourself one day
Then the press'll distort everything you say
YW+D : So jump in your plane and fly away

How I Ended Up in a 7-11 at 2:30 in the Morning in my snowflake pajama pants and eeyore nightshirt, holding a brownie in one hand and cheetos in the o

ther. (Title space has a limit?) Otherwise titled: Nighttime Wanderings.

I woke up from a nap at around 2 in the morning (so far, nothing out of the ordinary). I picked up the book that I was currently reading, "In the Shadow of the Law" (nothing strange there). I found my place and started losing myself in the story again (great book, by the way). Then, somewhere down the line (line 9, page 347), my mind started wandering.

After some random pit-stops, it wandered to "Meet Joe Black"- possibly the weirdest movie ever made in the history of movie-making. And damn, way to kill the effectiveness of the "dramatic pause" through overuse. Also, I don't think the director realized that if you pause for too long, intensity and level of anticipation and interest actually decrease exponentially, members of the audience actually start to forget why we are pausing in the first place, the link between the pre- and post-pause line lost in the silence. And so, we are left scratching our heads and wondering why the word "Death" has just flown out of the Brad Pitt's lips.

Anyway,...after ambling into Meet Joe Black, my mind then wandered effortlessly to Brad Pitt, who plays Death, and made a smooth connection to peanut butter (in the movie, Death develops a rather obsessive taste for peanut butter). *Gurgle gurgle*. My stomach approved. So, slave that I am to the desires of my tummy, I pulled out the pb and started eating it straight out of the jar with a spoon, just like Brad Pitt does in the movie.

Then, instead of wandering further into the murky depths of undiscovered associations, my mind remained a passenger on the food train, and I began to think how wonderful it would be to have a nice big decadent slice of 7-11 (we say "magic") brownie on a plate in front of me. But it's 2:30 in the morning! protested my voice of reason. He was quickly silenced. Throwing a coat over my pj's, I was out the door in a minute, down the escalator,...and that's how I ended up at 7-11 at 2:30 in the morning in the said get-up, with said comestibles in hand.

But what about the cheetos? That was to balance out the sweet with a little salty. Apparently, my voice of reason was not completely and properly silenced upstairs. That shall be remedied in good time.

Otherwise entitled: Why it takes me so long to read even a good book like "In the Shadow of the Law".

Do the dew, not the doo

Oh man. I dunno whether to laugh or be embarrassed, so I am currently doing both. I was sitting in front of the computer annotating WSJ sentences (OK OK I was surfing the net, reading the Times), when the bottle of mountain dew I had this morning called for a trip to the freezing cold bathroom down the hall. I opened the door, walked in, and exclaimed aloud to no one in particular: "pee-EWWWW!" because man it smelled like the worst case of doodoo in there, and because I thought I was alone. Only I wasn't because the next moment, I saw a pair of feet peeking out from under a stall from the reflection in the mirror. I had the horribly impolite but involuntary urge to giggle, and then thinking how embarrassing it would be to come face to face with the doodoo-doer, I quickly shuffled out of the bathroom. And now, I'm sitting in front of the computer once more, desperately needing to go pee.

Welcome Home

Gee, Philly is supposed to be the hub of violence, but so far, I've witnessed nothing in the city of brotherly love (KNOCK ON WOOD!). Then I come home to Tacoma for a 3 week vacation, and in one day, a fight breaks out at our local mall, right in front of my eyes, where a woman actually gets tasered, then later that night, I come out of a club in Seattle, and there's a guy knocked unconscious on the ground, his body twitching, and blood dripping out of his skull, forming a dark pool around his head. Then a couple weeks later (today), I learn that there was a fatal shooting at my old high school.

What's with that?

Yet, I still had a marvelous time yesterday in the beautiful city of Seattle, where I saw the Dead Sea Scrolls(!!!) which were on tour at the Pacific Science Center, and then had an interesting sushi dinner at U Village, which is all lit up with fairy lights at this time of year. It was interesting because it involved swiping our entrees directly from a giant conveyer belt. As for the scrolls, I've got a keen interest in ancient scripts/paleography, so no doubt it was fascinating and linger-worthy, seeing those arcane scrawlings on scraps of goathide which when deciphered, revealed stories about the genesis of the world and frightening tales of the fiery end of the world. And I even got to carry out a black-ops mission on the side, which involved faking a major coughing fit in order to get past security. OK, the coughing fit was real. The mission? Not so much. But y'all already figured that out...

Cobalt out.

Dinosaurs

Does anyone else find it amazing that dinosaur fossils are being uncovered to this day, that new dinosaur species are being discovered and outrageously named and studied, to this day? How can anyone believe in the Creation theory while knowing that these eons-old, gargantuan, sci-fi-ish creatures actually existed? Or is there a way to make the existence of dinosaurs compatible with Creationism? On "Friends", Ross is given a lot of crap for being a nerdy, boring paleontologist, but I think it would be a really cool job.

Obama and a dash of Dubya

Here's a brief, interesting article on Obama. I don't agree or disagree just yet, but I think it's time for me to stop making a god/savior-figure out of the poor guy and actually open up my mind to his faults as well as his strengths.

"You know, I, when I speak, like right now, for example, I'm speaking to the American people, of course, and I want them to know that I know how tough it is."
-- George W. Bush

Both are from Slate, which I never read until now, thanks to the influence of Eric and Jess. Maybe I'll vote for it next year.

Jack Kerouac On Madness

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

Reading Lolita Made Me Crazy

Does a book have to be serious in order for it to be taken seriously? I'm almost through with "Reading Lolita in Tehran", which I heard was an amazing memoir- and it is, but it is so ultra heavy and serious that now, all I want to do is curl up under my covers with a good comic book. I miss laughing with my books. It's ironic because part of the purpose of "Reading Lolita" is to convey the author's love of literature; it's about her desire to impart this love upon the reader. Instead, her book created in me this intense, semi-irrational aversion to the very thing she wanted me to love.

I'm reminded suddenly of the story I heard in psych class of a perfectly healthy man who pretended to be crazy in order to escape prison. When he was released and sent home to the care of his wife, the prison received a letter from his wife later thanking the guards for taking such good care of her crazy husband; that he was now safely in the care of a mental house. Turns out, after weeks/months of pretending to be crazy, he really did go insane.

In the same way, Nafisi took me, a perfectly healthy individual who loved to read novels, and through her desire to cure me (read: impart her love of literature on me), instead instilled in me a fear of "good literature". It's no surprise that I am often found these days sitting in the back of the car reading "Mutts" and laughing hysterically, or even sitting at a Barnes reading Godel Escher and Bach, which although it is no light read (literally), at least does not engage my emotions too much with depressing stories about the drudgery of living in an oppressed land.

Speaking of light reads, this morning I opened up a window to the Times, and started gasping and nearly hyperventilating (ok, exaggeration, but whatever).

"What?! What is it Angie?!, what's wrong?" asked Sarah and umma (mom).

"Guess what? The title of the 7th Harry Potter- it's been announced! EEE!!"

"OHMYGODWHATISIT?" cried Sarah.

"Gee, I thought it was something important," grumbled umma.

So exciting. Harry Potter gets serious too, but unlike "Reading Lolita", it's also funny and contains magic, fantasy, imagination, and thus bears little semblance to reality (although one can definitely draw some parallels if one really has the hankering to do so). In short, my kind of book.

Time & Space

Time:

Pun with non-native English speakers: Yesterday, my family and I decided to update the family portrait that's been hanging on our walls for the past 11 years. We had more than 2 hours to kill before our appointment (because we're not the kind of family that makes appointments before going into the studio...and also, the updating of the family portrait was kind of a spur-of-the-moment idea), and so my cool dad decided that it was indecent for girls that graduated from Penn to go around without watches (yeah, now you see where I inherited my amazingly rational brain). We spent such a long while browsing the Sears watches that I wondered if we'd missed our appointment, but Cool Dad assured me, "don't worry, we have plenty of time."

"Ho, ho, get it? We have lots of time?" I said, gesturing to the gazillion watches that surrounded us at the mo', and winking a couple times in case they didn't get it. Well, maybe I didn't wink enough times, because Cool Dad, after releasing a couple plosive 'ha's', said, "but you do know that shi-geh ('watch') is different from shi-gan ('time'), right?

I knew I should have winked a 3rd time. See, in the Theory of Joke-Telling, the winking, among other functions, serves to sway the audience from their inherent tendency to be so literal-minded, allowing individual words to cluster into groups of words that are similar enough to be deemed identical (we say the words are isomorphic) within the particular joke-world.

Thus, my winking should have dispelled the notion, for the moment, that "watch" and "time" were two distinct words. Unfortunately, I forgot the often-ignored corollary, that when the audience consists of either non-native English speakers or members of the Chung family- double whammy- than the jokester ought to consider throwing in a couple extra winks for good measure.

Space:

I discovered the true relative position of the sun to the Earth way back in the first grade- which in itself was kind of an embarrassing moment. See, we were doing a poetry unit, and Mrs. Bornander had each of us stand up in front of the whole class and read our poem aloud. I guess in my lame first-grade poem, I was describing the various objects found on planet Earth, like sky, grass, flowers (and rainbows and butterflies yay), and when I reached the part about the stars, moon, and sun, my classmates started snickering for some reason unbeknownst to First Grade Me. I stood there clutching the piece of paper with my poem written on it in one hand, and staring up at Mrs. B. as she tried to explain very nicely that the sun actually lived outside of the Earth. How traumatizing. No wonder I hate class presentations. I think that is the first time I ever considered that anything existed outside of our humble planet, past the blue sky.

When Two Jobs Meet

Here is a sentence I had to annotate for my linguistics job:

"The Penn bookstore charged John $100 for a mechanical pencil."

Heh. I love real-life examples.

WPSM

I now carry around a screwdriver in my purse, so that the West Philly Screwdriver Mugger (WPSM) and I can have a proper duel for my wallet. I imagine the scene to play out like this:

WPSM: Gimme your wallet (wields an intimidating-looking screwdriver in his hand)!

Me: Wh-wha? Oh hey, you must be the Screwdriver Mugger! Hold on, lemme just look in my purse here...(I rummage through my purse much like the way Mary Poppins rummages through her carpetbag, muttering to myself)...Ah ha! I've got my own screwdriver, what now Screwdriver Man?!

WPSM: Gimme your wallet, or I'll poke your eyes out!

Me: Oh-ho-ho-kay, fine, just take it. And keep the screwdriver, too. (By now, I'm too chicken to call him a "filthy animal" like in Home Alone.)

Damn! Instead of making the world safer, I've managed to arm the Screwdriver Mugger with a second weapon! Woman!

Good thing this isn't real.

Most people just laugh and say "Silly Angie" when I tell them about this new habit, but when I mentioned it to the Penn Shuttle driver last night/this morning, he said, "Instead of a screwdriver, you should carry around a screw. You know, he's probably just a harmless, guy who wants to unscrew a screw, and here everyone is thinking he wants to attack them." What can I do but laugh, because that's just the funniest goddamn response I've gotten yet. And so I laughed, saying, "Oh, wow, yeah, he probably just wants a screw!" And then I stopped laughing because that's not so funny. Eep! I hate violence.

Rhyme Time

Inspired by Vinod's cousin, who fell asleep in the tub yesterday, followed by a discussion of disgusting bathtubs, I present a poem of neither rhythm nor rhyme, but plenty of alliteration:

Orange gunk gathers
Cracks 'n' crinkles caulk
Along yellow, aged edges
Where sprawling limbs lie
The slumbering sot

(A drunken snore here would be appropriate, but not entirely necessary)

Working Toward Self-Destruction, or Irrelevance

"The goal of the GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program is to develop and apply computer software technologies to absorb, analyze and interpret huge volumes of speech and text in multiple languages, eliminating the need for linguists and analysts and automatically providing relevant, distilled actionable information to military command and personnel in a timely fashion. Automatic processing "engines" will convert and distill the data, delivering pertinent, consolidated information in easy-to-understand forms to military personnel and monolingual English-speaking analysts in response to direct or implicit requests."

This description of the GALE program is taken directly from the DARPA website (DARPA is a research program funded by the Department of Defense). What worries me just a smidgen is the bolded part. So essentially, we're working to eliminate our relevance in the workplace is what they're saying, which sounds like a bad thing doesn't it? But after a moment's thought, I realized that machine translation research is only one of many fields in which the work is, as I called it "self-destructive". Research scientists in disease prevention, alternative energy sources, anything technology-related- all these can be self-destructive in some way. But I'm not that worried, because most of the time, a solution to one problem only generates more problems (more work for us!), like infinite recursion, and also, it will be way beyond my lifetime before a solution is even found. Although, judging by this really interesting article on machine translation, it may be sooner rather than later in this particular field. (Okay, looks like the article "Me Translate Pretty One Day" won't be posted on line until December 1st.) Here is a text version of the accompanying picture:

"Dos burritos, por favor"

Human translator: 2 burritos, please!

Machine translator: 2 young donkeys, please!

Ducks Backward Sans Vowels

Check this webcomic out, it's awesome!

Ponder This

"Chew the cud" means to ruminate, and "ruminants" are cloven-hooved quadrupeds of the suborder Ruminantia, like cows, who chew their cud. Which begat which? My guess is that the name of the class of animals comes from the thoughtful expression that appears on a cow's face when it chews its cud. I also think we give cows too much credit. What kind of deep thoughts do you think ole Bessie is mulling over as she chews her molasses-like abc grass? Certainly nothing as deep as world domination.

"I Dunno"

What do you say when someone asks you a question you don't know the answer to? You can either

a) reply in Belgian ("waffle waffle") with the proper intonation and accents and stuff, or

b) go Poppins on the inquirer, singing "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!", or

c) gaze fatefully and absentmindedly at the moon, and say "Mars is bright tonight."

Think of these options as the equivalents of a blank stare. That last one is from Harry Potter 1.

Wow how did it become a post about Alias? I thought the world revolved around cheese

I decided that I am not a pathological liar. In order to be a pathological liar, I must believe in the lies that I tell, which I most certainly do not. Lying is a valuable skill to have/develop, especially if one is involved in the business of crime-stopperage, espionage, getting out of sticky situations, and being a good mother.

For instance, Irina Derevko was an awesome mom, and what was that line that defined, directed, and defended her actions from beginning to bloody end? Truth takes time, baby! Come to think of it, we still don't know the truth. "Ah, but there was neither truth nor an endgame in the Alias-verse, little grasshopper" says the wise, objective non-viewer. Lord, if life, reality, and morality are anything like Alias, then we're in trouble folks. No objective truth, no official moral code that is above human interpretation, we may as well be Lost on a little island in Hawaii. With a fat guy named Hurley. And a misplaced polar bear.

To be honest, I'm not far from believing that the subjectiveness of the Alias-verse well reflects the realities of our own Universe, but that's another story for another time. (Something to do with colors and evolution and moral codes.)

Luck and Deception

You know, I don't believe in luck, but sometimes I like to pretend I am lucky, and then luck seems to follow me around. Or, I like to pretend that coincidence is luck.

I am currently playing an incredible, whopper of a prank on my bookstore co-workers right now. It is awesome. Details later. Oh god, it's so funny.

Bookstore Encounter #847

A customer came in today looking for Pimsleur's Arabic and Hungarian language tapes. She was a thin, energetic, vigorous woman of about 45 or 50 with white-blonde wavy hair, tanned, weathered face, and unnaturally blue eyes (contacts, she confirmed later). As we rode up the escalator, I asked her why she was learning these languages- whether it was just for fun, or for her line of work. She said it was useful in the kind of work she does for a living. Of course I had to ask what she did for a living, to which she replied, "I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you." We both laughed, while my mind wandered immediately to Alias and Sydney Bristow and espionage in general. I said aloud, "We laugh, but it's true!" She and I burst out laughing even more jovially at that.

I'll bet you the world she was a spy.

The whole situation, with the laughter, and the secret thoughts hiding behind the laughter, and the darting of the eyes to see if we could read behind each other's laughter was...funny. She and I got to talking for a bit about how dead-useful knowing a bunch of languages can be, career-wise, especially Arabic and Spanish. She said she was a flight nurse in the military, and a regular nurse at HUP as her civilian job (she is soooo a spy!), but dude, if she had told me that she worked at a bank, I-I, I don't know what I would have done. I might have just fainted right then and there.

Anyway, hm, oh well, the point is, sometimes, I forgot the reason why I want to learn all these languages, and the theory of language, and then this woman came along to remind me that they do have a place in the world, that I'm not just wasting my time and being unpragmatic. Thanks, Lady with Unnaturally Blue Eyes. Do you think if we did a retinal scan on her, she'd turn out to be a double, like Ethan Hawke or (shudder) Francinator?! Ok-kay, I really need to turn down the imagination station a notch or two or five.

(She is soooo a spy, y'all! Eeek!)

Oh, and I met Jonathan Safran Foer yesterday.

Math and Politics

The situation is, people are pissed off at Kerry because he said the following at a rally in Cali:

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

American soldiers in Iraq, among other groups, were extremely insulted by Kerry's "joke" because it sounded like he was saying that they were dumb.

I just want to say one thing about this whole situation, and it's pretty ironic really because the outcry stems from a logical misinterpretation on the part of the American soldiers: Kerry's statement was not an "if and only if" statement, as we say in the language of math or logic. His statement, broken down into essentials, says

not smart => stuck in Iraq.

American soldiers misinterpreted his statement as:

stuck in Iraq => not smart.

P implies Q doesn't equate to Q implies P, in other words, but it's a mistake we make often in math as students, and in life and politics apparently. I know it's a technicality and probably would annoy people if I tried to point it out, but I just wanted to throw it out there.