I am the proprietor of the Penguin Café, I will tell you things at random

I'm now much more wary of being that kind of artist, or even that kind of blogger, because it just seems to me that it tangles us up in the puppet strings of narratives which are there to trip us up and waste our time. These narratives have, over the last twenty years, got both more slick and more shrill. And it doesn't really matter whether we're pro or anti the actors involved; the important thing is that we tune in, we follow them, we frame the world with the kind of understandings these stories bring with them.
via imomus


I'm running up 42 flights of stairs Feb. 11 in Cleveland.

Where was my family this weekend? No one was home when I called everyone on the weekly roundup. I can only assume that there was some clandestine Proctor meeting about how amazingly awesome I am. Next time, just invite me: I can share the awesomeness and my rates are comparatively reasonable. Call 1-888-AWESOME!

Year of the Fire Dog

The Fire Dog - dramatic, ferocious, alluring, motivated by strength of mind and self confident.


Q. That sounds like I should look into switching to smoke signals.
A. Well if you want, the president can stop the illegal wiretapping just for you.
Q. Really? Well thanks, that'd be great!
A. And then the terrorists can come and eat you.
Q. Wait! What?
A. Cause without the wiretaps there's nothin to stop the terrorists from eatin you, yknow. The terrorists and their army of bees.
Q. Oh no! I'm allergic to terrorists AND bees!
A. Oh that's too bad, cause now the president hasta stop the illegal wiretaps and let alllll those terrorist bees eat you.
via fafblog

Kaki King live at The Stone Church, Newmarket, NH [Dec. 30 2005].


What one person hears when listening to Fallout Boy. Warning: contains a plethora of shabbily drawn penises.

what do you mean? we're IN the future!

Girl: The fuckin' R train is a motherfuckin' myth. I swear to god, it's the fuckin' unicorn: only fools and virgins can see it.

--Canal Street N/Q/R/W station
Overheard in New York

This week in Landon: The Best of T-Rex and a simple vegetarian pilaf.


I saw Breakfast on Pluto last night at Drexel. The movie as a whole was episodic and fragmented by design so no character arc or unifying theme. However, Cillian Murphy was amazing to see in action and I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys watching creative acting choices.


Laura and I went to the book club discussion at the Columbus Public Library tonight for Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. We'd never gone before but I'd seen the notice about six weeks ago and I thought it was time to get through it. Laura had read it before but forgotten nearly all of it. If you can get through the first of four parts, you've got it made. Next month's book is Herzog by Saul Bellow.

During his ergodic theory class, Bergelson constantly warns us not to get behind in our reading. He dislikes covering anything from our (many) books and insists that going over the printed material is wasting time and chooses instead to concentrate on the cusp of research; the unanswered or just answered problems.

Yes, yes I know: this is math 970 or whatever it is and I'm taking its prerequisites concurrently but... there's no way I'm "being lazy" when I've spent the last week frantically devouring a radically disproportionate amount of material for its professor. I like my brand of math a.e. happy and well-rested, please.

could you play the five chord please

This paper came out about three weeks ago and it's blowing my mind:
From well-quasi-ordered sets to better-quasi-ordered sets
by Maurice Pouzet and Norbert Sauer

Zenzizenzizenzic

Good news: Yared worked out how to conserve properness in the names of the structure trees we've been working with. This makes the lifting go very smoothly in the proof of [S(I¹) ≤_rg S(I²) ⇒ I¹⊂I²].

MARRIAGE BETWEEN HUMANS AND ROBOTS, ASSUMING THAT BOTH THE HUMAN AND THE ROBOT ARE HETEROSEXUAL AND NOT NONHETEROSEXUAL AND THAT THE ROBOT HAS A GENDER-SPECIFIC IDENTITY, AS OPPOSED TO SUCH SEXUALLY AMBIGUOUS ROBOTS AS R2D2 AND GORT. We are OK with this. Unless the robots are gay.

Monday comics

I tried to post earlier today but had my wires crossed or something and I lost it. This is what you get instead when I'm low on time.

angel with a wisdom flamethrower

One of the stolen Klimt paitings Austria has to return.

As usual, I tried to put the image above on a free hosting service so that it lasts longer and doesn't pull bandwidth from the site I'm linking to. The service I tend to use is Imageshack, but I 've been having problems with it lately. It uses some crappy algorithm to scan uploaded items and weed out porn, but it tested a false positive for the Klimt painting. True, it uses a lot of natural flesh tones, but that's because it's a paiting of a person!

whatsamatayou

Utterly unaware of the heavy-handed irony, my overheard lunchtime conversation:

Frosh1: Did you read that book over the summer? The one about the culture of cheating?
Frosh2: No.
Frosh1: Well how did you write the paper for class?
Frosh2: I downloaded one off the internet.

Followed by nothing. No laughing. No wry glances. No grimaces at the ridiculousness of the preceeding statement. I wanted to lean over and suggest the definition of irony.



Working on: BQO's, weak mixing, topological nets, and the strong perfect graph conjecture.

I will play no longer

Pictured above: Landon John Spoonhower . Penny Lane Spoonhower's new son arrived on Thursday, December 2 at 10:14 pm, weighing in at 8 lbs. 4 oz.
via Kathy


Dock workers use road signs to attack French policemen near the European Parliament in Strasbourg January 16, 2006. Dock workers clashed with police during a protest against the European Commission's plans to liberalise port industry services, a move that will be debated by the European Parliament on Tuesday in Strasbourg.

I told someone off this evening and it was a relief. I should have done it a long time ago but I hadn't the balls yet. As Epictetus put it,

But remember the principal thing: that the door is open. Do not be more fearful than children; but as they, when the play doth not please them, say, "I will play no longer," and go; but, if you stay, do not complain.

I found myself starting to complain and I was not willing to accept that.

send in the clowns

My favorite new chord: 5x6422 (AM13). It stretches you out over five frets and makes you work for that sweet sound.

This week in Landon: Green Day's American Idiot and pork & apple stew.

I have been working almost 40 hours per week for the last two weeks so please excuse me if I haven't been updating like I normally do. I'll try to keep at least to a light schedule.

I slept late over the weekend so I'm using Monday to catch up on my long run before work. I have to read up on BQO theory, too. Yared and I are trying to plumb the depths of a connection between L^ωF(m,Q) and P(Q).

running, running, running

Lady: Excuse me, but I'm looking for a book.
Store chick: And?
Lady: I don't remember the title or author, but the cover is purple.
Store chick: Our purple books are downstairs.
Lady: They sent me up here.
Store chick: We're sold out of purple books. You want something in a yellow?

--Barnes & Noble, Brooklyn Heights
Overheard In New York


An Iraqi man yells while standing beside the body of his relative, a victim of a bomb blast in Kerbala, 110 km (70 miles) south of Baghdad, January 5, 2006. At least 49 people were killed and 68 wounded on Thursday when a suicide bomber blew himself up on a crowded street near one of the main Shi'ite shrines in the southern Iraqi city of Kerbala, police said.



I went to the opera Friday night (my first) and it was rad. I wish I had had more sleep in me to appreciate it better.

Ship of Fools

A crazy few days from start to finish.

Laura came over and we made dinner yesterday. Then Laura left and Abby stopped by. We made a potholder. We discussed Jaymee's impending exodus to Florida. I finished off the bottle of Cabernet and my homework. My dad calls and I'm not coherent enough to help him with a computer problem. Then Brent IM's me. He comes over and we go to his house. Melissa is there. I wake up this morning and go to classes mostly out of it.

Cool new lemma: given any tree T, there exists some vertex v in T whose removal divides the remaining connected components into two disjoint graphs each with vertex set of size at least |V(T)|/3. It's easy, fun, interesting, and immediately applicable to larger theorems.

Came home, wrote a letter, took a nap. Went to Josh's and made music with his crazy new organ and Adam. Adam brought incredible stew from the North Market. Watched LOST. Josh's cats had kittens a while ago and now they're walking around for the first time. So adorable I could wring the cute from them one by one and bottle the resulting essence for a handy profit. Sarah had ice cream from Jenny's: chocolate and cayenne pepper. I get home and read Foucault's Madness and Civilization. Fab's friend is visiting from PA. We played with the SOMA cube, the tinfoil man, Hœnir, and played SET. I meet with Yared tomorrow (today, really) so I have to get some rest.

less to say than i thought

I saw Gay Cowboys today. Excellently done. I may have to see it again soon.

How the brain infers probability distributions.

Geoff came over after I was done with work. I made a potholder while we discussed the nature of our world, fintite state machines, and socializing.

I still haven't installed the 200 gig hard drive I got for Christmas. I'm lazy and I haven't wanted to bother. But now I'm running up against the confines of my current drives and its getting annoying. I may have to spend an hour on Tuesday getting everything kosher.

My M,W,F days are killer. From 8:30AM until 11PM I'm pretty much booked solid. But my T,Th are much better. OK. I have to sleep.

Tempt not a desperate man

Running, eating, working, reading, drinking, stretching, sleeping, homeworking.





Man: We were in the club and I went to the bathroom and there was a girl next to me at the urinal. She said, "Stop staring!" I said, "You're in the men's room, I'll stare all I want."
--14th & 6th
Overheard In New York

we took your photograph

I spent most of the evening relaxing with friends and whisky (a friend?) after I got home from work & homework.

Twice this evening I have heard the front door open. Either that means the wind blew it open or someone tried to walk in. If someone tried to come in, I credit Caitlin's gift to me for deterring them from robbing me. I have the life-size tinfoil man sitting nonchalantly in a chair, legs crossed, hands folded, in full view when one walks in. It is still disconcerting to me each morning when I come down the stairs, so I can only assume it is more so to someone who doesn't understand.

I wrote almost everyone I know fantastically drunk emails this past hour but saved them rather than sent them, to preserve the indignity and to reinforce how stupid such an act is for my future self. Additionally, this post is wildly drunken.

Robertson blackmailed me/bribed me into joining his combinatorics 870 class. I wanted to get another speaker for our seminar and he intimated it could be arranged: 'but oh, by the way, why aren't you taking my 870 class? Let's talk about it after our class tomorrow. See you then.' That sly bastard.

Anyway, I'm not waiting up anymore. G'night.

images

This week in Landon: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (self-titled) and since I received a crock pot for Christmas, black bean soup.

Ha-ha, sucker

I saw The Squid and the Whale today. I am still digesting it but it was great.

Does anyone else want to make their own cheese with me? I have a supply of unpasteurized unhomogenized milk from a farm and I need outlets for it. Would people enjoy homemade cheese as gifts? I know I would.

Perhaps one day the Indian will put down his tomahawk and the white man will put down his gun, and the white man will pick up his gun again because, Ha-ha, sucker.
-Jack Handey

TurkeyBot

Thanks to Caity and Steve for the holiday photos. And also the closeup shot of your dog's crotch. Extra classy.

I had fun at MILO last night. I wanted to not stay too late but once the champagne started flowing at midnight I was stuck. I got out by 4AM and bed by 6AM and still managed to run this morning before I went to the Columbus Zoo. Thanks everyone who invited me somewhere else that I didn't happen to go.

Fabrizio is back after being out of town for two weeks. We have ergodic theory with Bergelson this quarter: awesomeness. Classes start Tuesday and I can't remember being more excited.