January 2006 minutiae

  • I was typing something about a TV movie I saw in 1984. "I've been referring to this scene from time to time for 21 years now" (backspace backspace backspace) "22 years now." New Year's Day is when all your subtraction problems suddenly have different answers.

  • There's a T-intersection I take to get to my apartment. I just realized that the signals are set up for a four-way stop. ¼ of the signals point at nothing, just an empty lot with some bulldozers. They flash yellow when a normal signal would be green. I guess people are thinking that in a year that will be a shopping center and people will need a signal to get out.

  • I signed up for Google Adsense for my "adamcadre.ac sells out" page and it started feeding me ads in German. Achtung! Wo ist mein Druckbleistift?

  • I was baking a potato and it exploded because I forgot to prick it with a fork. I was a little surprised to find that that wasn't a myth after all.

  • Dan Shiovitz on whether instant runoff voting — ranking candidates instead of selecting one — is constitutional: "I guess slaves would have to assign 0.6, 1.2, 1.8 to the candidates instead of 1, 2, 3."

  • The host of the party Jennifer goes to every year for New Year's commented in Jen's journal that "having you here to start the year off just seems right." Yow, sore spot. I have never had anyone to kiss at New Year's despite being in a relationship for six years because Jen always went to this person's party. One year Jen said, "If you have another plan for New Year's, please tell me and I won't go to the party." I couldn't come up with a "plan" — I just wanted to stay in with her — so in the end she went to the party. This pretty much encapsulates why we split up.

  • The Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have been going for a full two years. They were designed to last three months. You'd think that at this point the NASA scientists would be thinking, "Hell with it, let's pop some wheelies."

  • AP: "Part of the reason for their long survival is pure luck. Their lives were extended several times by dust devils that blew away dust that covered their solar panels, restoring their ability to generate electricity." Yeah, and that freak storm of Lemon Pledge helped too.

  • cnn.com: Watch: Toddler dies after fall from hotel balcony. Uh, thanks all the same.

  • cnn.com: Paris Hilton accused of "vicious lies". I'd say "slow news day?" but I suspect that there could be a nuclear war and the lead story in the US media would be about what Paris Hilton had for breakfast.

  • What is Paris Hilton famous for anyway? Some people become famous as actors or singers or athletes, but she didn't get a TV show until she was already famous. A few people become famous just because they're really hot, but Paris Hilton has the face of a borscht belt comedian. Seriously, she's like Fyvush Finkel in drag. You can't even say she got famous for the sex tape, since the sex tape became a big deal only because she was already marginally famous: "OMG Paris Hilton is in a sex tape!" No, she became famous because she inherited money and went to parties with C-list celebrities, and thus ended up appearing in the celebrity press. Our culture sucks.

  • cnn.com: Hotel heiress involved in tiff with other heiress. See, this is why we need the estate tax.

  • Someone from Pacific Lumber on NPR: "Every log has a cutting solution." Man, when even the lumberjacks are using corp-speak we're all going to hell.

  • If you had asked me in 2002 what the average monitor resolution in 2006 would be, I would have guessed 4096 x 3072. Maybe the tech singularity is overrated.

  • Delayed reaction: on January 7, 2006, I was driving up I-880 and suddenly started crying because planes flew into the World Trade Center.

  • When I got home from work I started shaking uncontrollably and everything was spinning and I felt like I was freezing to death. I turned up the heat and lay in bed shaking for three hours. Finally I managed to crawl to the kitchen and took a sip of water, and I instantly felt better. Several gulps of water later I felt perfectly okay except for still having a cold. I think what happened is that I was pretty dehydrated from being sick and then standing in front of a classroom for eight hours straight, and then I had a really salty pizza. The net effect was like being stuck on a liferaft and drinking seawater.

  • People freak out when a car's dome light is on, but I accidentally left mine on for 22 hours and the car still started up fine.

  • It wasn't until January 9th that I realized that I probably shouldn't archive emails from 2006 in my "2005" email folder.

  • AP: "Recalling his days as one of Hollywood's most popular action stars, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Monday that a weekend accident won't stop him from riding motorcycles. As an actor, he said, he had to sign contracts covering possible injuries from stunts. 'I did all those things anyway,' Schwarzenegger said. 'I never played by the rules.'" Wow, he really is a Republican.

  • cnn.com: Watch: Colin Farrell sex tape hits the Internet. "Watch"? Watch what? Watch the sex tape? Watch the progress bar on the upload?

  • A BBC reporter talking about a cold snap in Delhi said that people were responding by wearing "woolies, jumpers, and monkeycaps." Not to mention snozzjackets and vorpalshoes.

  • She also said that temperatures may "touch zero." In the US, of course, we would say that temperatures may "hit zero." What a violent culture. (Also I guess we'd say that they may hit 32, but that's another thing altogether.)

  • I have a recent immigrant from Thailand as a student in one of my classes. She always bows to me when she leaves. I thought about telling her to stop, but on second thought maybe I'll make everyone else start.

  • Netflix has possibly the stupidest radio commercials ever. They involve a fake quiz show that goes like this: "'What's half of Tuesday?' 'Sunday afternoon.' 'Correct! A dog travels into the future and bites his own tail. When does he feel it?' 'Yesterday.' 'Correct! How much does Netflix charge in late fees?' 'Zero.' 'CORRECT!'" The problem is, the setup doesn't make her a genius — instead, it suggests that her final answer is just as much made-up bullshit as the first two. It would be better if she were actually giving correct answers to difficult calculus problems or something. But I guess that would be beyond the acumen of the people at the advertising agency that came up with this crap.

  • Someone on Metafilter asks for advice in how to greet at the airport someone he's been flirting with online. One respondent suggests, "Take some flowers and put on the card, 'I have never wanted to kiss someone so much as I want to kiss you right at this moment.'" Another replies, "Even if this [were] tactically sound (which it isn't) the message on the card is an obvious lie. You can say something like this and it might be true but if you write it advance there is [no] way it can be." Yeah, what if she reads it while you're in the bathroom?

  • Google does a lot of things well, but Google Alerts aren't among them. I just got an urgent email telling me that I might be interested in a page I myself posted in 2004.

  • I went to a very sparse page of links about Russia. There were only three listed under the heading "Modern Day," and they were all links to images. The links read: Russian President Vladimir Putin with a fish; Putin with another fish; Putin and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

  • cnn.com: Newborn found in recycling bin. In Tibet this is referred to as "the bardo."

  • If you wanted to go totally Silver Age on Captain America you could have a league of Captain Americas from different states, customized like Green Lanterns. Like, the one from Washington would wear a flannel costume and the one from Mississippi would wear a Klan hood for a mask and so forth.

  • cnn.com: Pamela Anderson calls for removal of Colonel's bust. Because her own reduction surgery went so well.

  • Here is a standup bit I made up for a new parent: "So after my kid was born people kept telling me that I should get some of those Baby Einstein tapes. Have you heard of these? They show different animals and objects and things and repeat their names, so your kid's just soaking up knowledge whenever the TV's on? Yeah, I wish someone had explained this to me earlier. Because I went to the store and got the DVD of Baby Geniuses. Now my kid has an IQ of 50."

  • This evening after the sun went down the sky was still bright, just a little deeper blue, and it was beautiful and the air was thin and breezy and being outside was just bliss. I love it here.

  • I got a comic book out of one of my boxes of comics and started to put the lid back on when I realized that I no longer have to do this immediately — for the first time in years, I don't have to worry about a cat jumping in the moment the box is open. That made me happy for a second and then sad.

  • The cooking pots I bought in 1999 have lost a lot of their nonstick coating. I guess most of the missing Teflon has gone down my gullet. Yikes.

  • Sometimes my synesthesia's strong, sometimes less so, but it's really kicked in for "2006." No matter where I see it, that number is the color of a golf green on a sunny day. ("06" by itself is deep forest green.)

  • Twice now I have seen sports articles talking about a nonexistent team. One said that the Buffalo Bills beat the Oakland Raiders on the way to the Super Bowl in the early 1990s; the other said that the New England Patriots beat the Oakland Raiders on the way to the Super Bowl in 1985. Does no one remember that the Raiders spent nearly all the 1980s and half the 1990s in Los Angeles?

  • Eventually I will do laundry enough times that I will stop finding Jennifer's hair in my clothes. That will be sad.

  • I am sitting in on a few classes at my alma mater, just out of interest in the topics — I don't know enough about classical music, for instance, or art history, so since the survey classes for those are huge and have lots of seats available I figured I'd drop in and learn something. One class I was interested in was "History of Native Americans in California," but luckily I found a copy of the handouts online before showing up. Among the assignments are "Getting to know your fellow classmates by name, hometown, major, and favorite food (5 points/Due week 3)." Also there is a vocab list due in the first week whose instructions begin, "Define the following (Use and cite the dictionary)" and the words are things like "justice" and "honor." Uh, I think I'll wait until this topic shows up in the History Department rather than in Ethnic Studies. The frequent references to the "zero tolerance policy for indignant attitudes" and the fact that "indignant attitudes and indignant students will be dismissed from the class" and "allowed to return at the professor's discretion" give me the sense that these classes tend to be little more than a string of hippies having meltdowns. To borrow from Chris Rock, I love progressive politics, but I hate hippies.

  • It is weird to come back to a university after a decade away and find that the professors have the same faces as my peers.

  • When I mentioned this to someone online, he said, "Yeah, and the students are children," but I only agree halfway. They don't look like children to me — maybe because the people I work with are fresh out of college themselves. But they do act like children. The conversations I overhear — yeah, it's junior high plus alcohol. (Maybe that's redundant.) It's disappointing to hear college professors at one of the world's premier universities have to lecture classes on how to behave like grown-ups.

  • One of these professors is the first person I've ever heard say "twenty oh six."

  • I'm trying to blend in and not draw attention to myself, seeing as I'm not actually enrolled, but I'm not good at it. In one class of 423 people I ended up getting into a one-on-one discussion with the professor on Day Two. In a medieval lit class I dropped in on and decided not to take, the professor asked the class when the Magna Carta was signed (or rather "when Magna Carta was signed," since apparently academics don't use the "the") and I blurted out "1215." The professor looked startled. "Who said that? Who said 1215?" she asked, looking around. I sheepishly raised my hand. "What's your name?" she asked. (Uh-oh.) I said "Adam." She said, "Are you a history major?" I said no. "Well, 1215 is absolutely correct!" she said. "Wonderful! Thank you!" I guess even in an upper-division class the students haven't been showing up with much of a knowledge base.

  • The campus maps now all have east at the top. I guess that makes sense in terms of elevation.

  • Course readers have covers now, with colorful pictures and everything. In my day they just had title pages on colored paper. Oh brave new world!

  • Radio ad: "You'll feel better, protected by Bayer." Even better would be to be protected by bear! Bear is good protector! Scary!

  • Paul Krugman on the Abramoff scandal: "If you're a congressman, toeing the line on legislation brings you free meals in Jack Abramoff's restaurant, invitations to his sky box, golf trips to Scotland [...]" Wait a minute. You mean the bribes these Republicans were accepting from Jack Abramoff were basically the opportunity to spend time with Jack Abramoff? That's really twisted.

  • I think the nice thing about having a desk is that a pile of crap on a desk looks a lot better than that same pile of crap on the floor.

  • I met someone who claimed that he and his roommates had once had a contest to see who could get scurvy first. According to him, it took them all about two months, and manifested as severe toothaches and gum problems. Then they had a party at which they drank a lot of orange juice.

  • Weird brain glitch: I forgot how to open my door. I kept turning the key the wrong way and shoved the door with increasing frustration. At one point I went down to the driveway to make sure I had the right house.

  • In a particularly gritty part of Oakland, near the Coliseum and right across the street from a trash compacting facility, are two factories. It's hardcore industrial squalor, which makes the signs on these factories a little incongruous: one says Mother's Cookies, the other Sunshine Biscuits. Best of all is a sprawling complex of warehouses in front of the latter factory. These grimy warehouses also have a sign. It says, Sunshine Storage Center.

  • I'm surprised they're actually calling it Super Bowl XL. I thought they'd go straight from Super Bowl XXXIX to Super Bowl 40. I'll still be surprised if they call it Super Bowl L instead of Super Bowl 50.

  • I probably won't live to see Super Bowl C. That's a weird thought.

  • I briefly wondered why there wasn't a sports team called the Cheetahs but then I realized the answer.

  • One of the downsides of getting really good headphones after having only listened to music in the car or on computer speakers is that you discover that some of the songs in your collection have really crappy production.

  • I had to reread the Book of Revelation for my apocalypse class. It was a long slog, like the rest of the Bible apart from Ecclesiastes. What jumped out at me was the Aspergery fixation on specific numbers. I know that over the centuries various commentators have tried to calculate the beginning and end of the world based on Biblical references; I remember reading one that claimed the world began on September 23, 4004 BC, at 9 am. (I got a big laugh out of this in junior high by miming God creating the heavens and the earth and then quickly looking at his watch.) I always dismissed this sort of thing as overly literal foolishness on the part of medieval monks and slow-witted pastors, but looking at all the numbers in Revelation, it does kind of seem like it's begging the reader to do some math. Though I would guess that the math the author had in mind was kabbalistic rather than arithmetical.

  • I went to the big new Thai grocery up in Berkeley to stock up on ingredients for tom kha and red curry paste. That meant galangal, but when I looked next to the ginger, I was a bit taken aback — the sign said "GARLNAGA". Misprint or different type of food? Is this what galangal is supposed to look like? Then I looked a couple of spaces over and saw, under the lemongrass, a sign that said "LEMON GLASS". Ah ha, I thought. So it is a misprint. I put the "garlnaga" in my basket. Then when I went to the register I found that it was a high tech one that displayed the name of everything being scanned. When the checker scanned the mystery item, the display read "GALANGAL", so I knew I had the right thing. Great. Then she scanned the lemongrass I'd selected and the display read "LEMON GLASS".

  • cnn.com: Authorities unearth 1,200-yard tunnel into U.S. The interesting thing is that it's from Paraguay. They've still got some digging to do.

  • cnn.com: "News of a crash in which seven children perished so upset their grandfather that he had a massive heart attack and died, the children's mother said. William Scott, who was 62, died at his home. (Watch as news of the deaths proved to be unbearable -- 1:18)" Seriously, what the fuck? I'm supposed to click a link and watch a man have a heart attack and die? If not, WHY PHRASE IT LIKE THAT? What the hell is cnn.com's problem?

  • mamster: "I mean, the Miers nomination made Bush look like a jackass."
    me: "So did his entire first time, and that worked out for him."
    me: "time -> term"
    me: "Though I bet Bush's first time made him look like a jackass also!"
    mamster: " 'Baby, I'm absolutely confident that the act I'm about to perform on you is legal.' "

  • AP: "The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim announced they will officially change their name to the Anaheim Ducks at the start of the 2006-07 season." This move changes them from my least favorite hockey team to my co-favorite. I'm not joking! (Of course, I don't actually follow hockey, so my selection of favorites is pretty arbitrary.)

  • Today I was listening to Live 105 and they played "Out Here All Night" by Damone (currently #16 on my Hot 100) followed by "Seether" by Veruca Salt (#45). Maybe corporate radio isn't all bad. I can't imagine that combination popping up elsewhere except on my copy of Winamp.

  • On Shattuck Avenue, out in front of a Vietnamese restaurant, a guy was grilling up shish kabobs. Staring at him intently, body rigid, tail thrashing, was the most alert dog I have ever seen.

  • Walking up Shattuck, which I guess is very slightly uphill, the muscles in my shins went into agony. After a few blocks I was hobbling. What the hell. I mean, yeah, I guess I have to get used to walking longish distances again, but why would my shins in particular freak out about it?

  • As I walked up, a middle-aged woman in a motorized cart asked me for money. I said "sorry." I got some slices of pizza and passed her again walking back to the office. "Can I have one of your slices of pizza?" she asked. While I generally don't give money to panhandlers, I will give food, so I started to hand her a slice. She wrinkled her nose at it. "I don't want that one," she said. "Give me a different one." Apparently she had a contrarian position on the relationship between beggars and choosers.

  • mydd.com:
            by Sun Tzu, Sat Jan 28, 2006 at 03:40:55 PM EST
            I'm fairly new to writing in html and posting extensively
    Lao Tse adds, "Me too. And what is with this PHP crap?"

  • One of the scholarly articles I have read for my apocalypse class mentions the book Jitterbug. It's very obscure, to most. In fact, the only other time I have ever heard it mentioned was when my college roommate's brother secured the film rights to it.

  • Why is "subpar" an insult when in golf you actually want to be as far under par as possible? (If George Carlin didn't make this observation 35 years ago I'll be shocked.)

  • In other senility news, I was at a cafe when I looked in my bag, which was sitting on a chair next to me, and had a moment of panic as I realized that my computer was missing. The reason it wasn't in its pouch, of course, was that I was typing on it.

  • Possibly the best line I have heard all month: "Now, I do have both some acquaintance with female genitals and, to a lesser extent, with the design of clutch plates."

  • At the end of my music class a techie guy went up to the professor and asked, "Is it true that all possible music has already been discovered?" The professor did a bit of a double take and asked, "What?" The techie guy continued, "Since there are only twelve notes, wouldn't it take only two or three years to work out all the possible combinations?" I have to wonder about the sort of mind that could seriously entertain the notion that music has been solved. I mentioned this online and Andrew Plotkin observed, "Fortunately, the President has a national strategic reserve of sharps and flats under his desk."

  • In my first two classes, only a couple of people take notes on laptop computers. But in my art history class, there are enough of them that if you pay attention you can hear an ocean of clicking keys.

  • Some of the dry-erase markers at the Cupertino TPR office say "SKYBRUSH" on them. Every time I write with one of these I think of Monkey Island jokes.


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