*Sigh* I've been debating what to post tonight. On the one hand, I have not much going on in my life right now. On the other hand, a big huge blog eruption uh.. erupted. On the other hand, yeah that's right the third hand, I thought about posting on a BIG SERIOUS SUBJECT that is all about being philosophical and thinking deep about life and stuff. So what I'm going to do is split the difference, or two-thirds the difference as the case may be.

So the thing is that my life is so boring right now. And this being a diary, a narrative of my life, I have not much to narrate on tonight except the boringness of my life. So here goes. I'm bored, my life is boring tonight, let's all be bored together.

P.S. Please do not send me any advice on how to make my life not boring. I'm taking advantage of the boringosity of my life by catching up on important laying-on-the-couch time and watching reruns of old Twilight Zone episodes. Sample dialogue: "Consider if you will the case of Lady Caroline, who learned that when one makes one's bed, it is quite necessary to lie in it."

P.P.S. Hee, funny blurb from Miss Alli at Television Without Pity: "I sometimes think I'm not fully appreciating yogurt, based on how much the women in the commercials seem to be enjoying it. You just open it and eat it, right? I mean, that's the whole thing? I'm not leaving something out?"

P.P.P.S. Er, I forgot what I was going to write. Never mind.

So, there is a big to-do on the blogs today because Ann Althouse blew up at Garance Franke-Ruta on bloggingheads.tv. I've posted the YouTube video below. Here's basically what happened. Althouse complained to Franke-Ruta about liberal bloggers being big meanies, in particular being big meanies to Althouse. And Franke-Ruta replied that she doesn't follow inter-blog conflicts very closely, so the only specific instance she knew of when liberal blogs were harsh to Althouse was during the Jessica Valenti breast controversy. Then bam, Althouse just loses her shit. How dare you bring that up in that way, how dare you misrepresent what I said, when you know we don't have the time to fully flesh out what really happened, and on and on and on. And the whole time Garance is like, "Um, I really don't know much about it..." and "Um, all I really said was that it was a controversy.." Anyway, I first heard about the bloggingheads altercation from this short post at Tapped from Ezra Klein. (By the way, I've been meaning for a long time to talk about this article on The American Prospect website, Tapped being the weblog of The American Prospect, about the conservative pushback against the V-Day movement and college productions of The Vagina Monologues, but I could never think of a good excuse to work in into a day-to-day posting here, so I'll just mention the article now and reserve the right to link to the article in the future.) Because Microsoft sucks ass and Internet Explorer only allows me to view videos whenever it feels like it, I can't watch bloggingheads.tv videos, so I didn't see the Althouse-Franke-Ruta exchange and I didn't think much about it, particularly since the only thing I remembered about the "Jessica Valenti controversy" is, as Eric Alterman perfectly puts it, Althouse "accused a female liberal blogger who met with Bill Clinton of having breasts ... or something." Anyway, I pretty much forgot about the whole thing until I saw this post on Andrew Sullivan's blog which said that "the blogosphere is abuzz" and links to nine other blog posts about the dust-up. In addition, Garance posts her take on her personal blog. By the by, Althouse claims in her tirade that the writers at Tapped are always picking on her, but according to the Alterman post I linked to earlier, Althouse has hardly been mentioned at Tapped. What Althouse is most likely referring to are comments made at Lawyers, Guns and Money by Scott Lemieux and by Ezra Klein on his personal site. Both men also write for Tapped, but apparently hadn't had any substantial discussion of Althouse at that site. Anyway, everyone will forget about the whole thing in 2 days, I'm sure, but the fireworks are fun for now. Enjoy the video.

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I mentioned last week about how I liked swing-era jazz, but not so much later-era jazz. One of my favorite artists from the early jazz age is Bix Beiderbecke. He grew up in Iowa and would sneak to the banks of the Mississippi to listen to the jazz bands playing on the riverboats. Later on, when he was sent to a boarding school in Chicago because of discipline and grade problems, he would sneak to the city's speakeasies to listen to jazz. He taught himself to play jazz cornet (trumpet), and quickly became a star on the instrument. A jazz anthology I have says this about his performance in the song "Singin' the Blues":
Bix Beiderbecke is the third in a triumvirate (with Armstrong and Bechet) whose genius made improvisation the prime ingredient in jazz expression. But "Singin' the Blues" (in truth, not a blues) is a first, a vital expression of real jazz passion in a romantic ballad. Until Beiderbecke, jazz at slow tempo existed only in the blues. Today jazz would not exist if its players couldn't swing while playing a love song. "Singin' the Blues" was actually recorded under the name of the C melody saxophonist, Frank "Tram" Trumbauer, who wasn't as creative as Beiderbecke but was also pivotal in the development of the jazz ballad. His solo, preceding Bix's, was the most influential sax solo of its time-- influencing, among others, Lester Young.
Unfortunately, Beiderbecke was a depressive and an alcoholic who, aside from his vices, suffered various health problems. He died at the age of 28 in a shabby apartment in Queens, NY while having an attack of DTs. Below is a slide show (made by me) set to "Singin' the Blues" (Beiderbecke's solo is in the second minute of the song) and also a segment from the Ken Burns documentary Jazz on Beiderbecke.

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I went to see David Fincher's Zodiac this weekend. A previous movie of Fincher's, Se7en, which depicts a world gone horribly wrong, is one of my favorite movies. The atmosphere of the movie is so relentless that the gruesome serial killings seem to be a logical product of the movie's unnamed city, rather than an aberration. Judging by the descriptions, Zodiac seemed to be a similar movie. Not necessarily in its having a overwhelmingly depressive feel like Se7en, but in that its being a movie about the world surrounding and creating a serial killer rather than the serial killings themselves. That actually wasn't the case though. The movie is more about the way the serial killer affects the lives of those drawn into his story-- newspaper reporters, police detectives, random obsessives, and the spouses and families of those people. The Zodiac killer was a real life serial killer in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The killer sent encrypted messages to newspapers that he demanded be published on the front page or he would commit more murders. One of the newspapers that received the messages was the San Francisco Chronicle, and one of the people who worked at the Chronicle was a cartoonist named Robert Graysmith. Graysmith became so engrossed with investigating the Zodiac killings that he lost wife and family in his quest. In real life, the murders remained unsolved, and the movie stays true to that. Graysmith wrote several books about the killings, and the movie is based on those books. In them, Graysmith identifies the most likely suspect, who died before he could be brought to justice. The movie plays out differently than most crime procedurals, with lots of false leads, blind alleys, red herrings, and, in the end, no definitive answer. In that way, it brings us into the world of the obsessive Graysmith, forever convinced that the next lead will be the one that reveals all, and the next suspect will be the true murderer.

The weather was absolutely gorgeous this weekend-- sunny, temperatures reaching into the 70s. But I didn't go hiking. I was planning on driving out to the Garden of the Gods on Sunday, but when Sunday came around, you couldn't pay me a million bucks to get off the couch. Well, you could pay me a million bucks, and I would've gotten off the couch, but you couldn't pay me five bucks, maybe not even ten bucks to get off the couch. I just felt so incredibly lazy. But the weather is supposed to stay pretty warm, even though it's supposed to rain this weekend coming up, so there should be plenty of chances to go hiking. I want to go out to Sentinel Point pretty soon, although that hike scares me because the last time I tried it I got completely, dangerously lost, and after many hours ended up stumbling out of the woods dehydrated and exhausted, and I had to hitch a ride back to my car from an ex-Marine who I think was probably drunk and who yelled at me because I didn't know how to tell direction by looking at which side of the trees the moss grows on. I never did find out which side it was.... the shady side I guess, which is the south side? or the west side? Which side does the sun rise? I know it's my bedroom window side, but that won't help me when I'm lost on Sentinel Point. Anyway, the Sentinel Point climb is pretty difficult, so I want to make sure all the snow melts before I try it, so I'm going to wait a couple weeks.

I heard back from my insurance company, and they're finding the other driver at fault for the car wreck. But her insurance company is finding me at fault. So what happens now is that they're going to take the case to an insurance arbitration board, and they'll decide who, if anyone, was at fault. The thing is, my insurance company actually investigated the accident. And when I gave my statement on the phone to my insurance person I kept on saying how "that crazy lady was driving on the wrong side of the road" and "she must have been blind as a bat because she never saw my car" and "have you ever seen the TV show Hunter? Cause that nutty broad was a worse driver than Hunter, and he wrecked a car every week." But the insurance person said that even though she was representing me, she had to give equal weight to both sides, so she couldn't take my word that the other person was a worse driver than Sgt. Rick Hunter. So, my insurance person evaluated both stories and I think went out to the scene to investigate. However, when the lady's insurance company called me for my statement, which didn't happen until this Monday, three weeks after the accident, they told me that because each of us had different stories, they would have to believe their client's stories. Also, the claims person was calling from Kansas City, so she couldn't go out to the scene or do any sort of investigating. Which is all a long way of saying that I think my insurance company's findings should carry a lot more weight than the other person's insurance company's findings, so I think my chances are better than average in arbitration. Unfortunately, arbitration won't take place until May or June, so it'll be a while until I find out.

My boss forwarded me this job announcement for an open instructorship position in the physics department at the Air Force Academy, starting this summer and running until May 2008. I'm going to apply for it, and one of the guys I talked to in my lab said that chances are pretty good that I'll get the job. So hopefully in a few months I'll be teaching, or at least going to orientation for teaching.

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So guess what? I'm going to Peru in June! To Machu Picchu. Well, actually to Choquequirao mainly, but to Machu Picchu also. A couple weeks ago, my boss in the lab had a little get-together at his house. And one of the older military guys who used to work in the physics department showed up. I recognized him from his name (Roc, appropriately enough), because I heard he used to climb a lot of 14ers. So I hung around him for a little bit, and he mentioned in conversation that he was going with his daughter to Machu Picchu this summer. And I thought, hmm, Machu Picchu would be nice. That night, I did an internet search for Machu Picchu vacations, and they weren't that expensive. But they were still pretty expensive, for me at least. Then a few days later, I rewrote my match.com profile, and I put it in that I was hoping to go to Machu Picchu this summer. It wasn't bullshit exactly, but I still didn't think I had the money. The thing is that a lot of the women, in their profiles, mention that they think traveling is a big deal, and about the only traveling I ever did was to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, so I thought it'd be nice to at least mention that I was interested in other places. But then I started thinking that maybe I could get enough money together to take a trip this summer. I paid about $1500 to move last year, which wasn't an expense I would have this year, and I got a slight raise in my salary this year, so all told, I should have about $2500 more this year than I did last year. So then this past week I started seriously looking into different vacation packages, and I found this one and fell in love with it. You volunteer in the villages for four days, helping teach street children and participating in the daily life of local families, and then you do a 4-day mountain hike up to Choquequirao, which is located at an altitude of 10,900 feet. I went to Kinko's and got my passport photo taken yesterday, which you can see at the top of this post (yes, that's my hairline making a fast retreat from my forehead, I've accepted that fact that I am going bald, I don't need to hear any snarky comments). And I booked the trip today. The only thing is that there's a chance if they don't find enough people to go on the tour that it might get canceled. I'll find out by April 10 for sure. If it gets canceled, I get a 10% discount on any other trip I want to go on. But I'm really hoping to go on this trip, so I'm crossing my fingers that it doesn't get canceled.

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I went hiking on the Section 16 trail this past weekend. The temperature was in the 60s, but guess what I saw:


Snow and ice, snow and ice, snow and ice....


more snow and ice, more snow and ice, more snow and ice...


And a cactus. A cactus?!?!? Hey, wait a gosh darn second, how did a cactus get in there among my snow and ice pictures??? Oh well, you can see the rest of my pictures from the hike here.

Posted at 8:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

-Is it corrupt to think that you did something right for once?
-Actually, yes.
Snippet of conversation about art, from Six Feet Under

If art isn't pleasure, what is it, work?
Pauline Kael, movie critic

I've been thinking about doing a post about art for several weeks now, ever since I read this article about jazzman Duke Ellington. While the article, by Clive James, is ostensibly praising Ellington, it also rails against bop jazz, the jazz movement that came in the 1950s, replacing the big-band "classic" jazz style of Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Glenn Miller, Ella Fitzgerald, etc. etc. An example paragraph from the article:

"I won't waste time trying to be funny about John Coltrane, because Philip Larkin has already done it, lavishing all his comic invention on the task of conveying his authentic rage. (For those who have never read Larkin's All What Jazz, incidentally, the references to Coltrane are the ideal way in to the burning center of Larkin's critical vision.) There is nothing to be gained by trying to evoke the full, face-­freezing, ­gut-churning hideosity of all the things Coltrane does that Webster doesn't. But there might be some value in pointing out what Coltrane doesn't do that Webster does. Coltrane's instrument is likewise a tenor sax, but there the resemblance ends. In fact, it is only recognizable as a tenor because it can't be a bass or a soprano: It has a tenor's range but nothing of the voice that Hawkins discovered for it and Webster focused and deepened. There is not a phrase that asks to be remembered except as a lesion to the inner ear, and the only purpose of the repetitions is to prove that what might have been charitably dismissed as an accident was actually meant. Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals. Above all, and beyond all, there is no end to it. There is no reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop. The impressiveness of the feat depends entirely on the air it conveys that the perpetrator has devoted his life to making this discovery: Supreme mastery of technique has led him to this charmless demonstration of what he can do that nobody else can. The likelihood that nobody else would want to is not considered."

The above article reminded me of another article I had read several years ago-- Dale Peck's evisceration of author Rick Moody. The opening line of the review is, "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation."

The thing is, my expertise is mainly on books and movies. I can tell fairly easily whether a book or a movie is good, subjectively speaking, but good can have very little to do with artistic. And I've always been of the opinion that possesion of or lack of artistry really doesn't matter, since artisticness seems to be often used to mean pretentious and seeming meaningfulness and almost always boring. But there is something to be said for art, I think. For example, people who don't like any movie with a sad ending are expressing a perfectly valid personal preference, but at the same time they're missing out on a lot of what's worthwhile about movies, a lot of the artistry, if you will. There are movies, like Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World that are wonderful, in my opinion, but probably incomprehensible by most people.

What I'm getting at, I guess, is that I generally think of movies as good or bad, and if I see one described as "artistic" in a movie review, I usually groan, because it's a sign of ponderous faux-meaning put on film. But I can see where a movie I might describe as "thought-provoking" or "really pretty, in a weird way" could be thought by others as artistic and boring. I wonder if that's the way things are in arts that I'm less familiar with. Because the thing is, like Clive James, I don't like bop jazz, and I like even less free jazz. But if asked why I don't like those types of music, I would probably say something like, "I can't sing or dance to it." Is that wrong? Am I missing the artistry? Should I put a little bit of work into appreciating these different kinds of music? I don't know.

I actually don't know what, if anything, I have to say about art, which is why I'm not exactly writing a post on art so much as I'm writing what I've been thinking about regarding a post on art. Because I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to an actual post on art, I figured I'd write down my thoughts for the time being.

Several months ago, I said that my posting was going to become less frequent because I was going to be doing some work on updating all the parts of my website. As you who look around my website from time to time have probably noticed, not much updating has occured. Well I think I'm going to try to get to work on that, the updating, this week, so my posting may be infrequent for the next few weeks. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to go ahead and get this post on art out of the way, because I'm sure by the time I get back to regular posting, I'll have plenty of other stuff to talk about. More car wrecks, bad dates, good hiking trips, snowy mountains, flooded kitchens are I'm sure in store for me in the near future.

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I was talking about the hippity hop music yesterday, so I figured I'd post a song from one of my favorite hip hoppers, Heavy D. The song is "Nuttin' But Love". It was released way back in 1994, back when the Beastie Boys were screaming about Sabotage and George Foreman was the heavyweight champ. The video was the directing debut for Brett Ratner, who went on to direct the Rush Hour franchise. He invited his then-girlfriend, Rebecca Gayheart, to the video shoot. Gayheart was famous at the time for being the beautiful "Noxzema Girl". She would later parlay that fame into a movie career making such classics as Urban Legend and Urban Legend 2: Electric Boogaloo. So, I really hope you enjoy the video, 'cause I got nuttin' but love for you baby, nuttin' but love for you honey.

Posted at 6:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (518) | TrackBacks (0)

I wasn't even sure I was going to write anything about Music and Lyrics, which I went to see this weekend. The movie was so blah, not good, not bad, just blah, that I don't really have anything to write about it. But it's not like there's anything else exciting going on with me right now. (Well, OK, the water hose going into my washing machine sprunk a leak last night, and flooded my kitchen so thoroughly that I had to wait for low tide before I could reach my refrigerator, but I sort of made a pledge to myself not to complain so much about stuff here, and everything is fixed and mopped and dry now, so no harm none.) Anyway, so I went to see Music and Lyrics this weekend. It's a romantic-comedy starring Hugh Grant as a has-been musician who is struggling to write a song for the latest new young thang on the Top 40 charts and Drew Barrymore as a never-was writer who waters his plants. They team up, of course, and write a pop song, which the new young thang loves, of course, and they fall in love.... Of course... The thing is that for a romcom, it's not very funny. And the song they write is not bad, but it's not great. I mean, for having to sit through a 2 hour movie to wait for that song to cap it all off, it really wasn't worth it. But it was a pleasant movie. The characters are nice and it's nice to see them fall in love, and it's almost impossible not to like Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, so it made me feel good to see things work out for their characters. But you know, blah.

So I substitute taught an intro. physics class on Tuesday. I wrote up a full lecture on Uniform Circular Motion, but it turns out most of it was for naught. I gave them back their midterms, which I guess were graded unexpectedly quickly, and we went over those instead of doing a regular lecture. I hadn't seen a single problem on the midterms until 5 minutes before class, so when I say "we" went over them, what I mean is that I called students up to the board and had them do the problems. And when they would get to a part where they weren't sure if what they were doing was correct, they'd turn around and ask me "Is that right?" And I was all like, "Well, do you think it's right?" And then I'd nod solemnly because learning is all about figuring things out for yourself. And plus I had no idea if it was right. It's too bad I didn't get to do my lecture, because there was a part where I was going to quote a lyric from DJ Kool's "Let Me Clear My Throat", and since the students would probably have no idea what I was talking about because that song came out 10 years ago when they were 8 years old, I would have said something like, "Don't you all keep up with the hippity hop music?" And then they would all laugh at me because I'm clueless about the hippity hop music. And that would've been a nice ice breaker. But alas it was not to be. I guess I'll have to save that joke for when I teach some class a few years from now, when the students will have been like 3 years old when "Let Me Clear My Throat" came out.

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I got my car back from the body shop today. They did an amazing job. Not only did they repair all of the damage, but they cleaned and detailed the inside. It looks better than it's looked in years. I still haven't heard from the insurance company about the claim investigation, but I'm not too worried about that at this point. I'm pretty much positive that the very worst outcome is that they'll find nobody at fault in the accident, which means I'm out my $500 deductible and my insurance payments go up. That would stink, but if the worst that happens to me after having spent the last 14 years driving on crowded city streets is that I have one accident with minor damage and no injuries, then I think I'm pretty lucky.... I went to the gym tonight, and this time I didn't have to eavesdrop on any conversations, I actually had a conversation of my own. An older guy on the treadmill next to me kept on staring at the digital display on my treadmill, which is kind of rude, to be honest. After I was finished, he asked me how far I ran, and I told him I ran 4 miles. He told me he used to run 10 miles every day, but then he got nerve damage in his legs and couldn't exercise for a decade. He said that the doctors think it was caused by Agent Orange in Vietnam, and they just recently figured out how to fix it, so now he's trying to get back in shape after 10 years of no exercise. He was complaining because he could only run at a pace of 10 minutes/mile. I felt bad for him for having the nerve damage, but he seemed to be really disappointed about only being able to run 10-minute miles, and I didn't feel bad about that. 10-minute miles is a pretty good pace, and the guy was 66 years old, so I said he should be pretty proud of himself. If I run that fast when I'm 66, I'll be happy. He said he wasn't going to be happy until he can run a 7:30 minute/mile pace. So I guess he's one of those people who isn't happy just to be in shape, he has to be in super-good shape. I kept telling him that 10-minute miles is nothing to sneeze at, but he didn't care. "I gotta get down to 7:30-minute miles," he said. You can't really argue with that, so I just wished him good luck and left the exercise room to get a shower.... Hey, The Big Sleep is on tonight! It's probably the third most famous Humphrey Bogart movie, behind Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. It's a film noir based on a Raymond Chandler detective story. The plot is notoriously convoluted. There is a famous story that during the filming, Howard Hawks, the director of the movie, realized that he didn't know who committed one of the murders. So he sent a telegram to Chandler asking who committed the murder in question. Chandler didn't know either, so the movie just left that murder unsolved. It didn't really matter because the best part of the movie is the noir atmosphere and the dialogue between Bogart and Lauren Bacall. They had met a year earlier on the set of To Have and Have Not. It was the 19-year old Bacall's first movie, and her and Bogart fell in love during the filming and they were married a year later, in 1945. One of the most famous movie quotes of all time was spoken by Bacall to Bogart in To Have and Have Not: "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow." The popularity of To Have and Have Not, coupled with the public's huge interest in the Bogart/Bacall marriage, convinced Warner Bros. to take The Big Sleep off the shelf, where it had been sitting for a year, and release the film in late summer of 1946. In the movie, Bogart plays the hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe (similar to Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon), and Bacall plays Vivian, the sexy daughter of Marlowe's wealthy employer, General Sternwood. Vivian is a classic femme fatale. Trouble surrounds her everywhere she goes, but she's nevertheless always ready to engage in banter with the hero, exchanging double entendres, sarcastic quips, and promises that will never be kept. Well, the movie's about to start, so time to stop writing.

Posted at 7:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I went hiking yesterday on the Red Rocks Canyon Trail. The weather was sunny and in the 50s, but it was actually a little chilly on the trail because of the wind. All I wore was a long sleeve cotton shirt. I should have brought my jacket. The bottom picture shows rock climbers; I've been hiking at Red Rocks three or four times, and every time I've seen tons of rock climbers. I'm almost definitely going to take rock climbing classes this summer, so that might be me hanging off the cliff just like those people in the picture above. Anyway, I don't have much time to write tonight. I still have to make dinner, and I'm teaching that class tomorrow, and I want to write up some lesson plans for it. My boss gave me a set of slides made up by the physics department for tomorrow's lecture, but I don't really like them very much, so I'm going to make up my own lesson. You're allowed to do that, the slides are just for convenience if you don't want to write your own lecture. I'll be teaching Uniform Circular Motion which is a pretty simple subject, so I'm not too worried. But I do need to get to work if I want to get any sleep tonight. You can view the rest of my pictures from Red Rocks Canyon here.

Posted at 7:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (496) | TrackBacks (0)

I've held out for as long as I can, but I think it's time for me to get an iPod. I know I'm way behind the curve on this, most people my age are on like there tenth iPod, but I've spent the past few years working my way up from Raman-noodles-for-lunch-everyday poor to Campbell's-tomato-soup-for-lunch-everyday middle class. Anyway, I'm finally starting to catch up enough on my bills that I can afford a few luxuries. And for the past few days when I went running on the treadmill at my gym, I've had a badly-positioned treadmill. I run for 20-30 minutes, and, if you get a "good" treadmill, then you can watch TV while you're running. I always watch the TV showing the Bill O'Reilly show, because he doesn't allow any spin on his show. That why he calls his show the "No Spin Zone". But for the past two days, I've had to use a treadmill on the other side of the room from the TVs, so all I had to watch is my own reflection in the window. And as gorgeous as I am, it gets pretty boring watching yourself run after about 2 or 3 minutes. So then all I can do is think about how tired I am, and then I psych myself out and think, oh man I'm so tired, I must have been running for about 15 minutes, and then I look at the timer, and I've only been running for 7 minutes. And then I just want to die. So, if I had an iPod, I could listen to that while I run, and I wouldn't want to die.

I love listening in on conversations when I'm in the locker room. Today, there was some guy saying something about a BBC reporter who announced the collapse of the World Trade Center several moments before the planes crashed into it on 9/11. He said it was posted on youtube and google, but that they pulled the video down several minutes after the towers collapsed. It was a grand conspiracy. And then I heard another guy tell a joke to his friend. This guy is the same guy who I heard talking last week about how Hillary Clinton is ruining the country. Anyway, here's the joke:
"It's the birthday of the favorite teacher in the elementary school, so all of the kids bring in presents for her. The little boy whose parents own a flower shop brings a box up to the teacher's desk. She opens the box and sees a bouquet of flowers. 'Oh, they're beautiful,' she says, and puts them in a vase on her desk. The little girl whose mom owns a candy store brings her box up to the teacher's desk. The teacher opens the box and sees a basket of candies. 'Oh, they look delicious,' she says, and eats one of the chocolate-covered cherries. Finally, the little boy whose dad owns the liquor store brings a box up to the teacher's desk. She lifts the box up and sees that it's leaking. 'Uh-oh, I think the bottle might have broke,' she says, as she catches a drop of the liquid on her finger and tastes it. 'Hmm, that's a unique taste, is it wine?' she asks the boy. 'No,' the little boy replies. 'Is it champagne?' she asks. 'No,' the little boy answers. 'Well, what is it?' she asks. 'It's a puppy!' the litte boy replies."

My boss is going to be out of town on Tuesday, so I'm going to teach his Intro. Physics class for him. It will be the first time in over two years that I will have taught a class. There was actually a shortage of one teacher in the USAFA physics department this semester, and my boss tried to get me in as a part-time teacher. But my contract didn't have teaching as one of my duties, so I would have had to have gotten a new contract, and I would have had to go through the full application and interview process to fulfill the Academy's teacher hiring requirements. It turned out it would have been too complicated, especially since the semester had already started and they needed a teacher ASAP, so it didn't work out. But it was nice of my boss to try to get me a teaching job, and there's a chance they might be short on teachers next fall, so I might have another opportunity.

I think I might see that new Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore romcom at the movies tomorrow. I've heard a few good things about it, and I'm a sucker for movies about music. I was just watching the video for "That Thing You Do" on youtube last night.

In my grad research, I would periodically have to polish the metal surfaces that I studied. If you work at a big company, and you have to polish metal, then you use a big $5000 polishing machine, which does the job in about a half-hour. But I didn't work at a big company, I worked in a little lab, so I had to do the polishing by hand. And when you do the polishing by hand, it takes about 12 hours. And it is so boring. You just rotate the metal sample around the polishing pad back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth... you get the idea. I kept myself awake by drinking a 6-pack of Cherry Coke and blasting music from some cheap speakers I bought for our data-taking computers. I would listen to the same 3 or 4 CDs over and over again - Buddy Holly's Greatest Hits, Violent Femmes' Greatest Hits, Bruce Springsteen's Greatest Hits (yeah, I have a lot of greatest hits albums), sometimes The Grey Album, sometimes the Beatle's Help album. But I think my favorite album to listen to was my Queen Greatest Hits album. "Bicycle Race", "Fat-Bottomed Girls", "You're My Best Friend", "Somebody to Love", all awesome songs. But the awesomest song is "Good Old-Fashioned Loverboy". I know that Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" is a tribute to Elvis. It's such a good tribute that many people believe it is an Elvis song. I wonder if "Good Old-Fashioned Loverboy" is a tribute to the Beatles' old-timey songs, like "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and "When I'm 64". John Lennon hated those songs and called them "grandpa music" or something like that. But anyway, the chorus and tempo of "Loverboy" reminds me a lot of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da", so I always thought it might be a Beatles tribute. Anyway, the video is posted below, so judge for yourself. I'm off to write a letter so I'll feel much better and use my fancy patter on the telephone.

Posted at 7:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Arghh. Everyone please stop feeling bad for me and giving me advice! I mean it, you're driving me crazy... When I decided to post about some of my match.com experiences, I was very hesitant, for a number of reasons. One of these reasons is that dating and romance and love tend to be "serious" subjects in real life, even though they are quite unserious subjects on Seinfeld or Friends or How I Met Your Mother. My plan was to embrace some of the sitcom-y take on dating and post about my non-serious experiences related to match.com, and if anything serious dating-wise, love-wise, or even friendship-wise happened, to keep quiet about it for a while until I felt comfortable talking about it in a large public forum, or at least as large a public forum as this little site is. So, with that in mind, let me be very clear. If you are reading my match.com posts from the last few weeks as dripping with sarcasm and filled with general befuddlement at humanity, or at least the female members of humanity, then you have the right idea. If you are picturing me weeping with heartbreak over my keyboard as I write anguished words of lament, then you have the wrong idea... There are billions of ways for me to meet people. I don't know if online dating is one of the worst ways, but I suspect for me it is. Certainly it's been a strange and somewhat hard-to-navigate experience. But the reason why I'm doing it and why I will continue to do it is that it's low impact. Since moving to town, I haven't really been very social, and I've been OK with that. Therefore, if some woman I don't know rejects me, and I have to go to the movies by myself or go hiking by myself on the weekend, that's OK. My life is no worse for getting turned down, and, considering the one date I've went on so far, it may be a little better. But the thing is, if I do meet someone, in a romantic way or in a friendly way, then all the better. But if not, I've had some practice in meeting people, and I know a little bit more about what works and what doesn't. These are probably things that I, at the age of 31, should already know about, but, before moving to Colorado, I spent more than decade in college. The social atmosphere at college is so much different than that in real life. You have to make an effort not to meet people in college; they're all around you and always inviting you to homework groups, club meetings, theater shows, dance classes, etc. etc. So getting out of that kind of atmosphere and into my present situation was more of a shock than I realized. But please, don't feel bad for me. As much as I complain here about dating, bad movies, car wrecks, getting lost while hiking, I am actually quite happy. So no more advice, when I need it I'll let you know.

Posted at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)