i'm still laughing

From the band Cake:

While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make
clockwise circles. Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand.

Your foot will change direction and there's nothing you can do about
it.

Hey, Gimme back my sock you goat bastard!

Thank you pinot noir.

Have you heard Brian Wilson's Smile? Jebus! It's insanely good!

pictures [pt. 2]

.

Failure Elevated to Art Form

What is our new Attorney General's middle name?

It is time to head to Euclid, for a sleep-deprived afternoon of bird-devouring, family-inanity, and repeating myself.

feckless, otise, logy bludge

Turn Your Back On Bush

You need 10 minutes and Flash to appreciate THIS.



Illuminated throne of AOL CD's

cold blue dawn of unreason

Ugh. Is this what the morning looks like? No thanks, methinks.

I'll take this instead:

"Rocking the Corporeal Plane"

...to borrow a line from Mike Doughty. I have been writing some trivial songs of minor significance for no reason. What I need is a four-track and a voice.

I think I may stay up all night, with the things I have left to do.

delicious, nutritious, seditious

Locust Cookbook

listing and readening

15 Worst Jobs in Science


Kaki King

Election Controversies and Irregularities Revisited

Healthy, Wealthy, and Dead

Early to rise and early to bed
Makes a man healthy and wealthy and dead.
~James Thurber, Fables for Our Times, 1940

I am going to the Book Feast at the Thurber House tomorrow so I thought the above appropriate, given the hour.

Also, my big run is tomorrow. This is scientifically comforting.

More Voting Irregularities

Summary of Berkeley paper HERE.

Garden State was right.

Sarte on the Bus

While I was riding to and from Cincinnati on Greyhound to my concert on Monday I read 'The Trancendence of the Ego' by Sarte. It is short, thought-provoking, and very readable. It keeps hammering home the idea that the 'I' is produced only on reflection; immediate experiences are only of something, not of ME experiencing something. Anyway, it sets up the liberating idea that who we are is only based on memory of what we have done. That is, we are totally free to make choices NOW not based in reflection. It's almost so obvious as to be not worth considering, yet there's something honest about it that resonates with me (ha, ha).

ぱしぱちは栗としらるる雨夜哉

pachi-pachi wa kuri to shiraruru amayo kana

the pitter-patter
of falling chestnuts...
a rainy night

-Issa

(to view the Japanese, have this installed)

pictures

Pedro at the Southgate

(an entire concert in MP3's above)

The Pedro the Lion concert was incredibly good. It was the fourth time I had seen them this year. They played their usual staple of "classics": 'Slow and Steady Wins the Race', 'Never Leave a Job Half Done', 'Big Trucks', 'Indian Summer', 'Bad Diary Days', 'Of Up and Coming Monarchs', 'When They Really Get to Know You They Will Run', 'I Do'. But they had James McCalister (from Ester Drang) on keys who really filled out their sound. It also allowed them to play more songs from 'Control', my favorite album of theirs. Kendra came with me and was super cool for being such a sport by seeing a band she'd never heard of and driving me around when she was dead tired.

Nerd stuff. You have been warned.

Reading Baumgartner's proof of Hindman's theorem by way of [GRS]. I knew the ultrafilter proof (here) but Baumgartner's proof is entirely combinatorial. It is less slick but more clever, I think.

Check out MusicBrainz to organize all your MP3's and label them correctly. I have spent hours trying to do what this program automates.

Be very afraid. Wal-Mart knows everything about you.

Exit Polls and Weirdness

Time for everyone to put on their tinfoil hat:

"Without getting into all the state-by-state details -- I'll let Prof. Freeman tend to the numbers -- what happened last Tuesday, where a wide variety of extremely accurate exit polls suddenly turned out to be at the extremes or even beyond their margin of error, was exceedingly unlikely -- even if the benefits of these errors had been evenly distributed.

But they weren't evenly distributed. They favored Bush. Over and over and over. That's the coin flipping. And flipping. And still coming up heads. Heads in Florida. Heads in Ohio. Heads in a bunch of other swing states (even while the exit polls remained relatively accurate elsewhere). Almost everywhere the election was close, the coin just kept coming up heads.

How bad was it?

According to Dr. Freeman's analysis... 1 in 250,000,000.

One in a quarter of a billion.

In simpler terms, that 50-50 coin flip just came up "heads" almost thirty times in a row."

from Bob Harris

Pedro the Lion

I am going to see Pedro the Lion on Monday in Cincinatti. Josh isn't sure if he wants to drive yet, but I'll take a bus if I have to. My sister Kendra is there and she took the day off to hang out, which is nice. It is at the Southgate House where Laura, Josh, and I saw Pedro and Death Cab for Cutie.



Listen to them here

eBay

Some of my books on eBay did REALLY well. I guess I'm able to eat this month after all.

Running in the rain sucks booty. And I'm about to go do it. See you dry suckers later.

Liberals Return to Sodomy, Welfare Fraud

BERKELEY, CA—No longer occupied by the 2004 election, liberals across the country have returned to the activities they enjoy most: anal sex and cheating the welfare system. "I've been so busy canvassing for the Democratic Party, I haven't had a single moment for suckling at the government's teat or no-holds-barred ass ramming," said Jason Carvelli, an unemployed pro-hemp activist. "Now, my friends and I can finally get back to warming our hands over burning American flags and turning kids gay." Carvelli added that his "number-one priority" is undermining the efforts of freedom-loving patriots everywhere.

-The Onion

Sleep

I slept so little in Cleveland that I just crashed when I got home and went to bed for 12 hours. I haven't done that in a long time.

My feelings for Laura have started to change. I know: you would think they would instantly alter the moment she left, but they didn't. They hovered around where they were, sometimes with more of one component than usual but still mostly the same. It feels like a qualitative shift is occurring now, with new emotions I've never felt toward her before. I don't know what's happening or where it is headed, though, so I am apprehensive.

淋しさは得心しても窓の霜

sabishisa wa tokushin shite mo mado no shimo

also consenting
to my loneliness...
frost on the window

-Issa

(to view the Japanese, have this installed)

Paul Erdos

I got a collection of Paul Erdos' papers called 'The Art of Counting' from the library. I looked at it for a while when I was in New Jersey at Rutgers but I didn't appreciate it. Every paper in it is revolutionary and it tops 500 pages. I am reading an ingenius alternate proof of Ramsey's theorem I've never seen before. It gives upper bounds on a finite version literally thousands of orders of magnitudes better than the original. If this means nothing to you, read previous as: Erdos was THE BEST.

Back in Lumbus

I'm back in town for 20 minutes and Laura drives right past me on her way somewhere without seeing me. What is this called, emblematic? Microcosmic? Symbolic? Whatever it is, it seems appropriate.

Viridian Room

We finished the Viridian Room! It was me, Caitlin, Steve, Emily, and Matt. Steve and Emily gave up and then Matt came over to inspire us with dazzling feats of maniacal clicking and boundless intuition. Total: about 3 hours well worth the effort. We'll wait for the Blue Room until I'm home next time.

Matthew and I discussed the virues of different bands, guitar styles, and lyrical content. I showed him how to download perfectly legal movies with ED2K. I have to sleep now to catch the bus tomorrow morning.

Linen Hosen

Who now has a pair of white linen pants? That's right, it's ME! Unique Thrift rules. I decided to stay another day in the Land of Cleve. There is talk of playing the Viridian Room (the sequal to Crimson Room, see post below) tonight. I've never played it so we'll all be in the same crazy boat tonight. Listening to my old band Pacific since I'm here anyway.

A Sunday to Be Reckoned With

If anyone spots a greenish mini-van in the Cleveland area covered in yellow "Support the Troops" ribbon-shaped magnets... Proctors.

I went to Gina's today and hung out with her and Neil for a few hours, catching up on various parts of our lives and telling stories. She has long hair now like when I met her 10 years ago, which is semi-disconcerting; it's like time travelling to 8th grade. We had one metric shit tonne of fun.

Came home for Dad's birthday party. Played 4-D tic-tac-toe with Matthew until he found a winning strategy... damn you, Hales-Jewett! Garth was over and we talked about puns and made a Proctor assembly line out of distributing ice cream and cake with ruthless efficiency. Later I learned everyone's birthday for kicks.

I showed Caitlin, Steve, Matthew, and Emily the Crimson Room, to annoy and frustrate them. Then I made up a (harder) version of Petals Around the Roses because they weren't getting Crimson Room and it was killing them. But my dice game was even more infuriating so I had to walk them through it before they killed me. It was hilarious.

I will head back to Columbus tomorrow (today, technically). I had a terrific time here.

Cleveland

Listened to The Mars Volta for the first time at work today. Missed the first bus but eventually took a Greyhound to Cleveland late Saturday. They had a security check before you got on the bus and confiscated the pocket screwdriver set in my bookbag. They threw it out! That had me mad for a while but I got over it. Read my new book from the OSU sale on the way here: Puns by Walter Redfern.

My sister Caitlin's husband Steve is home in Cleveland for a few days from Marine training in Georgia. Their cat caught several mice running around my parents' house this evening, which grossed out some and amused others. You can guess which side I was on.

hi-ho, hi-ho

I work until 10 tonight. Come see me for a discount, bitches. Not much else happening today. You can see what I've been listening to here.

The Incredibles

I had to work tonight. Colin and Michelle (from MILO) stopped by to pick up tickets for The Incredibles for the midnight showing. I decided to join them after work and I'm glad I did. Strangely, even though I work at a theater, I don't have much interest in the movies that come there. Meaning, something has to be formidible to get my recommendation, which this does. I may even see it again, which I rarely do.

I got really sad after I left, though. I was riding my bike home and found myself thinking about Laura (big surprise, right?). The past month I have been down because she left me really abruptly, without a fight, without a conversation, without much notice. I've focused on certain things since then. Stupid things like hating myself for being a bad person/failure, or what I did wrong (even though she did say there wasn't anything I could have done differently). I haven't been mad but despairing over the ruins of what I have left, if that makes any sense. And tonight coming home I began to recall time Laura and I had together; not some idealized version without flaws, but the real thing. I don't want to list 1,000 instances of things we did together, for each other that made me happy. When she came over today she didn't want to look at me, and had to leave. I am upset with myself, not Laura.

I want to say that I am not OK. I am depressed and I can't seem to find a way out. I'm not stupid yet this situation does not yield to reason. I feel wholly inadequate, alone, disengaged, rudderless. Things that used to satisfy me fail to now. I can't pry this weight off my chest. I'm going to sleep before I become melodrama incarnate.

雁鳴て直に夜に入る小家哉

kari naite sugu ni yo ni iru ko ie kana

geese honking
hasten the evening...
little house

-Issa

sentimental crap

Now that I am newly alone (Laura moved out about a month ago (to not be with me)), is it possible to be any more cliche than to feel like all the songs I'm listening to apply to my situation? It's just so predictable and smarmy that I want to choke myself for feeling so transparently maudlin about it. A lot of people are telling me that this is a great opportunity to "grow", improve myself, etc. It just implies a kind of confident pioneer attitude I don't have right now.

I'm so not over this. It does not help that she lives two blocks away and that we necessarily come in contact with each other (finding each other's things in our own, mail still shows up here for her). I wish I could skip to the acceptance part of this. I'm still thinking like she's around: my thought patterns include her presence so I'm always tripping over myself lately. The apartment is so empty and messy. I like to think its disarray mirrors my own internal state, but maybe that's just an excuse for not caring. No point to this post except she's coming over today and I'm thinking.

book sale

Tonight is the Ohio State University book sale, and I'm there again like last year. I buy tons of weird math books that I will keep if they are good and sell on eBay if they are not.

running

Why the hell do I run? I've been doing it off and on for more than a year now with no idea why. I think I started it because my friend did it and I wanted to see if I could too. It has since evolved into something more personal; I enjoy every time I go further than I had previously.

Is it a competition with myself? No. I am not aiming to beat myself or anyone else, nor do I have a set goal in mind. Part of a healthy lifestyle? Hardly! I eat like crap and it shows. Is it stress-reducing? Not especially, since it is difficult (I sometimes run 10+ miles at a time) and time-consuming. I suppose I am proud of it though I know it is no accomplishment. I have a sneaking suspicion I substitute it for real personal progress, falsely measuring my self-worth by the distance covered.

it's late

baka nagaki yo to môshitaru yonaga kana

"It's a foolishly long
night!" I say
in the long night

-Issa

Ohio goes to...

I have the TV on while I'm putting some things together for this site. CNN is of course saying that Ohio is too close to call. Local stations mention that even though the polls are technically closed, some judges here have ruled that those who were in line at the polls when they closed are still able to have their vote counted. Voters still in line have the option to cast provisional ballots or keep waiting in line for a booth.

I will say that it seemed strange to me that my polling place (Medary Elementary School) had only four booths. For the number of people that turned out -- and there were a lot of what looked like younger voters -- I would have thought they might have prepared a little better.

first post

Why am I making a blog? Well, who isn't these days, really? I had the notion while waiting in line today to vote when I saw someone in line who I thought I knew. It made me wonder whether they had any presence on the web, or if they were off the map, so to speak. When I got home (it took 3 hours to vote!) I looked him up, but nary a trace.

Then I thought, well what about me? I googled myself and didn't find anything useful; if anyone were looking for me it might be hard to find a) how to contact me, 2) what I am up to, and d) anything meaningful about me. This corrects that. I hope in a week or two it will have a history page and links to people and things that are significant to me.

Is it self-indulgent. Yes.
Is this important? No.
Am I talking like Donald Rumsfeld? Yes.

That's all for now.