Page 153 of 181

November 20, 2003 /

I don’t know, is it still cool to like Weekly World News? Are they pre-post-hip or something? I don’t know. I can’t keep up. What I do know is that a couple of years ago I used them as my very first GSP hall theme, including stringing up multiple copies in the stalls for Quiet Reading Time, and it was a smash. I think that’s when I really fell in love with them.

And I know one other thing, which is that even when their headlines are ambiguous, they’re still some of the most refined brilliance commonly available for what, two dollars?

Osama Recruits Cloned Hitler

November 19, 2003 /

I’ve got student loans out that I need to have deferred (since I’m in grad school). There’s a six-month grace period, so I knew that November 24th was the Absolute Final Deadline for me to tell my loan provider my situation.

I’ve been freaking out at least once every other day since, oh, July, about these facts, and knowing that I really have to get around to them, but by the time I was in a position to do so that day, I’d forgotten, or there was something more important, or… you know. So today, with the specter of debtor’s prison breathing hot and heavy on my neck, I finally dug out the envelope labelled “LOAN STUFF” and pawed through it frantically. What if my response didn’t get through the mail in time? They’d extract the interest from my knees with a lead baton!

Turns out that the loans I have from Centre are provided by the same people as the loans I have at Louisville. They already know. I don’t have to do anything until 2009.

I’m an idiot, but hey, load off my back.

Happy International Ridiculous Globe-Spanning Conspiracy Day!

November 19, 2003 /

Today, November 19, 2003 (11.19.2003 = 17 = 8!!) is hereby declared International Ridiculous Globe-Spanning Conspiracy Day. In celebration, everything you see or do today will be in the service of absurdly complicated, cabalistic, hidden maneuvers, set in motion millennia ago. Today, every crackpot conspiracy theory, even if it contradicts with another true conspiracy theory, is true–because these guys orchestrated all those as ways of distracting crackpot attention from their own conspiracy. They’re the metaconspiracy. They’re so subtle they make the Illuminati look like the Fourth of July (incidentally, 7.4.1776 = 32 = 5 and 5 + 8 = 13!!!!) fireworks show. They own everything. You really shouldn’t raise any kind of fuss. The only thing they don’t control, in fact, is this post telling you about it.

OR DO THEY?

Happy International Ridiculous Globe-Spanning Conspiracy Day!

November 17, 2003 /

I went upstairs to the thirteenth floor (dun dun DUUNNN) (actually it’s called 14A, so maybe not) to return a borrowed book. Up there they’ve clearly had some personnel cuts, and most of the minicubes are defragged, which leaves a fifteen-foot-wide corridor between two banks of them. There’s exactly one occupied desk on those two banks. My thoughts on noticing this:

  • Cool!
  • But lonely.

November 17, 2003 /

“I didn’t get close enough to this bicycle tire spider to see what it was wearing (I’m not scared of all spiders, just ones who live life on the edge), but I’m assuming it had a flame-patterned skull cap tied around its head over those eight mean eyes, three of which work. It hadn’t woven a middle finger into its web; I checked.”

I twinned Audrey and Stephen. It only seemed right.

Speaking of friendblogs, I only just noticed that my first-year roommate and my friend Lauren were persuaded by the Centre PR department to keep travel journals when they went abroad. I’m pretty sure they’re both in DC (District, not David) now–Lauren living a sitcom, Ben… Ben doing Ben things. They’re both going to be President, possibly at the same time.

November 17, 2003 /

Today, Maria is taking all her exams for every class. On the same day. Most of these exams consist of looking at red-and-pink blobs with some white on them, and then answering questions like

Is this slide: (circle one or maybe two, we’re not telling)

  • The maxillonervous mandiflore splay
  • The mandillomaxous floresplay nerve (inverted)
  • The florimandillous splayinerve max
  • Dog puke (HA HA JUST KIDDING) (OR ARE WE)
  • The pukiflorimous nervedog mandisplay

Now, pay attention. The standard reward for students who survive this kind of hell-day is that, to “make up” for not having classes at the same time as exams, they get extra classes and labs every day this week. So the students have a choice of beginning / upping amphetamine regimens, or collapsing and missing twice as much information as usual.

The University of Louisville Medical School

“We have to let them teach. We can’t let them practice on humans.”

November 14, 2003 /

Work has been a tomb this afternoon–those of the developers who aren’t out with new babies are out watching Master and Commander or just avoiding the gloomy weather. I, as one of those unfortunates who’s still paid by the hour, don’t get to sneak out early, and I can’t do anything else on my project right now until somebody who’s gone gets back to me.

I’m kind of stuck for content on here lately, because it’s a strongly routined November so far–time passes quickly, but there’s not a lot of excitement or danger to be had. At work I run queries, wait on those queries, try to fix those queries so they won’t fail again, and repeat; at school I learn useful things, but they’re about as enthralling as you’d expect from a graduate comp sci schedule that’s heavy on algorithms. (Well, I had fun with string search, but I’m not going to write an entry about it.) And on Wednesdays I play Grand Theft Auto.

When I’m twiddling my thumbs waiting for mean ol’ queries to yell at me, though, I keep finding myself at William Wu’s Riddles (via vitanuova). A lot of the riddles there are the kinds of problems I was given as “fun” challenges at Gifted Student stuff when I was younger, and at which I was completely horrible. I find that now, at 22 (and without a competitive atmosphere), I actually consider them fun and worthwhile. I still expend lots of time and effort on solving even the stuff in the easy section, but it’s a great payoff when I get one. The only letdown is that I immediately want to show this off to somebody, but a) that’s lame, they’re easy and b) that kind of defeats the point of a riddle site.

If I get a little more motivation under me, though, I hopefully will be able to reuse some of this knowledge in the next six weeks, as I insanely try to design an RPG system. Those of you nerds who read this but not Crummy: want in?