My presence is of a dubious nature.

I had to take better than average notes today in all my classes because Fabrizio left for Meadville yesterday. Keeping up in differential topology is killer when I'm unfamiliar with the notation and I have to keep checking the board to see if I copied it correctly. So much notation!

Yared and I met today again. It's so useful to have the author of a paper explain the paper to you in person. I spent an hour by myself trying to understand something that took him 2 minutes to explain.

John called me and we discussed the nature of the universe, perception, zombies, and truth. That is to say, nothing unusual for the two us. I will always need an outlet for my philosophical musings and hopefully John will always be there to help provide that for me.

I have to run early in the morning. While my angst-fueled pavement bender earlier today was stress reducing, it wasn't up to form, paced, or, due to time constraints, even of a length sufficient to wear me out. There is a race tomorrow morning, the Clintonville Cat Caper. It's too much money ($25 for a 5K) for too little in which I can participate; I'd have to leave for work right afterward, missing all the food, community activities, raffle, etc.

Thus if you are there, you probably won't see me. Because I won't be there. If you see me there and I'm not there, please ask me where I am. In addition, there are a lot of places I won't be but I don't want to itemize them for you. I imagine that you can deduce many of them yourself. For example, if you don't see me somewhere I am probably not there. Unless I'm hiding. Then I'm there but you just can't see me. That's also true when I'm invisible. So in summary: if you see me somewhere I might be there and if you don't see me somewhere I might be there. My presence is of a dubious nature.

something is not always better than nothing

I made a fool of myself in combinatorics this morning.

Last night, before I went to sleep I had a great idea for one of the homework problems we were presenting in class today. So I volunteered this morning. But my idea was half-baked at best. I got up there with only a loose description of what I wanted and it was quickly apparent that much of what I said needed to be more fully justified. So I fumbled around for several minutes until I gave up and someone else did the problem.

I will now expunge my shame by running furiously during my lunch break fueled by my embarassment.

beauty, booty, and BQO

A peppercorn and a grain of salt.

My prayers have been answered: Jessica Alba is willing to do a nude scene.

Proving a Witness Lemma in Better-Quasiordering Theory: The Method of "Extensions"
by Igor Kriz
We introduce a new method for proving "witness lemmas" in BQO theory. As an application, we obtain witness-lemmas for arbitrary trees and for \sigma-scattered linear orderings. A positive answer of a question by Van Engelen, Miller and Steel follows.

I'm writing this in shame

I'm writing this in shame because I slept through combinatorics, my first class. I thought I could get by with less than six hours of sleep per night for the last few nights, but my body gave up. I'll make it to analysis at 10:30, but I'm still stupidly lazy.

The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000
These books are those most attempted to be banned from libraries nationwide. My personal favorite: #88. Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford.

I'm not a whore! I'm a dancer!

Giant Magazine has reassembled the cast of The Big Lebowski for interviews and what have you.


Headphones: live 9-4-2005 TORRENT. Listen to my favorite song of theirs: Shit Talker. I'm just a sucker for a good falsetto.

R.I.P. Alpha Hamstauri

I just watched the new Arrested Development.

I went over Josh's last night. He blew up at Chris Cropper after Chris accidentally let the cat kill Josh's new hamster, Alpha Hamstauri.

Your Heroes Failed

Homework, running, work.

When I got home, Raegan and Justin came over. So did Geoff. We ordered some food and played a lot of Set, downloaded whatever songs we wanted to hear right then and smoked peyote^*. Also we went back in time^*, killed Hitler^* and rode dinosaurs to the moon^*.



Here's a comic about people being that meta-ironic hipster cool that I so despise. Yet he wrote a comic about it...


^*Denotes not really having occurred.

for love of neighbors

The 50 Most Cited Works in the Arts and Humanities Index
Which of these have YOU read? Me:
4. L. Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations.
21. M. Proust - Remembrance of Things Past. 1914
22. L. Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 1922

Thursday night we had people over for a little get together. All was going well until the end of the evening. Our shady-ass neighbor Billy knocked on the door asking to use the phone. There were still people over and I didn't want to weird everyone out by inviting in our freaky white-trash neighbor at 1 in the morning. I grabbed Fab's cell phone and had him call while out on the front porch. But then Fab's cell died. Billy said that it was an emergency and could he use the house phone. I reluctantly agreed and led him to the kitchen where he just started blabbing forever.

Eventually everyone left the party (whether hurried by the presence of an ex-con with rotted teeth in our midst or not) except Geoff, from work. Finally Billy leaves the apartment. Just a few minutes later, we hear blood-curdling screams from next-door. It sounds like an animal being killed or worse. Its the guy who was just in here savagely beating the bajungus out of a woman next door. Fab calls the cops, Geoff runs outside to try to stop him. Billy runs away. The cops show up and now there's a crowd attracted by the screams or police lights. Finally he shows up again, the police arrest him, and Geoff needs to testify in court because he saw the whole thing go down. What an evening! None of it made a lot of sense or had any moral to it.

Manifold are thy shapings, Providence!

Manifold are thy shapings, Providence!
Many a hopeless matter gods arrange.
What we expected never came to pass,
What we did not expect the gods brought to bear;
So have things gone, this whole experience through!
Euripides, Medea



Yesterday I went to:
combinatorics
analysis
algebraic geometry
differential topology

TW Walsh's Pedro the Lion Flickr photoset


The Grim Meathook Future

Katrina Dead

Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible be daily before your eyes, but chiefly death, and you win never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.
Epictetus

suck it, Alejandro!

Baby names "Landon" beat out of the top 100 in 2004:

87. Carter
88. Hayden
89. Xavier
90. Wyatt
91. Dominic
92. Richard
93. Antonio
94. Jesse
95. Blake
96. Sebastian
97. Miguel
98. Jake
99. Alejandro
100. Patrick

Classes start tomorrow. I'm taking Combinatorics, Analysis, and Differential Topology.

i am a bright shining star

Some Flesh-Eating Diseases I Don't Want
vibrio vulnificus
group A streptococcal
methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

I just found out that several songs I know and enjoy are written about this short story: A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor.

Apples, thy name is delicious

Holy crap I have been listening to Jon Brion. I downloaded a bunch of his live shows and they're blowing me away.



You're not as smart as I think you am.

STRATEGIC ATTEMPTS
TO DEFLECT ATTENTION
BY THE MOST OBVIOUSLY
OVERWEIGHT MEMBER OF
THE DONNER PARTY.

How To Fake Like You Are Nice And Caring

I tried to get home today because there were two nice races around Cleveland, but I wasn't able to find someone to cover one of my shifts at work. It was kind of iffy all along so I'm not entirely surprised. Here I am stuck in Columbus again, so I'm pretending that I'm there and running the race distances both days.

Beverly Lytle is visiting Fab this weekend from Allegheny. She's in math as well, giving her extra credit of the soul.


A truck burns after witnesses said it was hit by gunfire from U.S. military forces in Baghdad September 16, 2005. Police and witnesses said that U.S. soldiers opened fire on the vehicle for unknown reasons, and that the truck was carrying supplies for U.S. contractors.

R.I.P. Dave the Cat

Josh called me as I was putting my clothes in my bookbag Tuesday afternoon, ready to leave. Someone in the neighborhood had found his cat, Dave, dead in an alley with his tail cut off. Josh was inconsolably upset; we didn't know if kids in the area had done this (there is a history of animal abuse) or if he'd been hit by a car. In any case, I didn't go to the farm like I had planned on Tuesday but instead got some flowers and went over to Josh's for the evening to try to help out.

Wednesday morning Laura picked me up and we ran some errands before we went to the farm in Johnstown. We picked vegetables, went canoeing, made a fire, and in the evening went to an interesting lecture in Delaware. While pushing it into the water, I took a compromising face-first dive into the canoe and cut myself. It was great fun but for the blood.

out of town

A laugh-out-loud comic today from White Ninja


It was all stairs and hills for me today. I will be out of town until Thursday. Carry on without me.

t-shirt nirvana

We have a guy from the math department staying with us for a few days.

Happy Birthday Garth

Calligraphy in a Latin Bible of AD 1407 on display in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, England. The Bible was hand written in Belgium, by Gerard Brils, for reading aloud in a monastery.

shame on mu

I haven't done laundry in a while, so I was low on shirts this morning. I rummaged through my drawer after my shower and found the only acceptable shirt in there: a Euclid High School PANTHERS gym tshirt. And the best part: it wasn't even mine. Clearly written in the name box on this thing is 'Pat DiLalla.' So I wore Patrick DiLalla's gym tshirt all day today.

But the thing is that today Columbus was (still kind of is) under siege because of the Ohio State football game. So everywhere I went the streets were clogged with masses of humanity draped in scarlet and grey. And yet for all their public drunkenness, many pedestrians who had an affinity for Euclid were aware enough of their surroundings to scream out our hometown's name wherever I went. The recognition was surprising, immediate, and very vocal.



I have an urge to write or call people who I feel like I've wronged. Is that weird? I feel like I've made a few mistakes when dealing with people in my life. I'd like to try to apologize for being stupid or ignorant or whatever lead me to act in ways I now realize are inappropriate. The problem is that I'm sure most people have naturally moved on in their lives and don't dwell on relatively insignificant interpersonal gaffes of mine. So it would probably seem like I'm in some 12-step program or that I found Jesus; in either case, it would be conceited and self-absorbed to assume that anyone would remember, let alone care. How to casually mention that, hey, I haven't seen you in a while but I'm sorry for fucking things up?

Bush approval rating at 39%: the lowest ever! Hooray!

decadence and obsolescence

I set up a network in my building today, to help further defray the cost of my cable internet. With one more person on the network, I think I'll make money.

The trailer for Shopgirl, Steve Martin's story turned into a Steve Martin movie.

I have to go run up and down stairs for an hour, now.

Happy Birthday John

18 years and 200+ days later and I still think you're rad.

fatalism is inevitable

The Uses of Disaster
An interesting article in Harper's Magazine about how authority has historically used disaster as a pretext to grab more power. Coincidentally, it was written *before* the hurricane.

I had a great time at work today. I've been in a good mood for the last few days and it's making everything more enjoyable. Even when things go wrong, nothing is really bringing me down. Maybe it's all the running? I end up having to eat more and that's always good fun.

Interesting mathematical properties of the number 666

keep trying, or don't

Another mid-sized run today.

funny is for the uninspired

Reading: Abstract and Concrete Categories

Recently downloaded: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.


Still sleeping too much, but I have to go run now.

I used to be smart, but now I'm just stupid.

Tuesday night Fab and I drank a bottle of wine and pontificated on art (Rembrandt was awesome, as it turns out) and ethics (he thinks it's science, not philosophy). Which leads to this morning where I wake up, read for a while, then go back to bed for a few more hours because it's my day off!

Josh calls, we go see The Transporter 2, which I recommend to anyone who wants to be thoroughly underwhelmed.

Fab goes out to the bar with a math buddy. I stay in and hang with Raegan, whose boyfriend is in the National Guard and has been shipped off to New Orleans to help. We play Set, get ice cream at UDF, and pick apples from trees in the neighborhood.

Listening to Sonny Rollins -- a fellow madman -- on his birthday.

Fab is home

Fab got home late last night. We figured out some WQO ideal problem that I had been wondering about. Then I went to go play Monday night poker but only one guy showed up at the new location except the guy who lived there, so it was a bust.

I watched Rock School yesterday, and it was great! I highly recommend it for anyone who likes Satan and/or documentaries.

I am pretty exhausted on the new running schedule. I have to make changes or rearrange things or something because now my body wants 9 or 10 hours of sleep all the time. Also, the Columbus Marathon is NOT in November, like I had thought. I don't really know why I thought it was, but I did. It's in October, which means I probably can't do it without hurting myself. So I'll run that as a half-marathon and run the full one somewhere else. But which one? I'd like it to be nearby, but nowhere nearby has the weather good enough to run in late fall or winter. So maybe out west? I don't know yet. But I'm running more than one marathon in 2005/06 so no worries if anyone wants to come see me; I'll be sure to run something in Cleveland and Columbus too.

George Bush DOESN'T care about black people

I just talked on the phone with John for more than 3 hours and I didn't want to kill him once! That's got to be a record.

Saturday comics

poker, Taco Bell, running

Because I'm completely addicted, I'm watching the World Series of Poker this year. Every. Goddamn. Episode.



There is a cop who has been hassling me the last two times I've gone to Taco Bell. Does he not like my beard or something? Am I so clearly anti-establishment that I now glow an unholy subversive light? Is doing math while eating Chicken Ranchero Tacos at 3AM criminal? If it is, I don't want to be on the right side of the law. "Take me away, officer. Yes, it's true: I've been proving theorems and eating shitty Mexican food."

He thinks I'm stealing soda I didn't pay for because I bring a drink in my Nalgene bottle. I have become increasingly rude with him the more he unwarrantedly bothers me. I may get arrested in a Taco Bell in the near future if I can't keep my big mouth shut.

More training today. Nothing but hills, stairs, and sprints. I have been trying to run 4 days per week, but now I think I need to start running 5 days. I used to go on 3 long runs per week, but that was when I was running-ignorant. That's a bad idea. Now I have one long run, a faster one half that distance, a speed day, and an endurance day like today. I think the 5^th day will be a relaxing longish run (8 or 10 miles?) not on my route, where I don't worry about time or pace, etc.

Q as in Cuba

Co-worker #1: Does this skirt unflatter me more badly?
Co-worker #2: I don't even know how to answer that question.

via Overheard in the Office

Josh has gone to Cleveland for the weekend. Fab should be home soon. I have to clean the hell out of the apartment. Hanging out with Geoff tonight, perhaps.

Thursday pictures