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Well, it's back to the grindstone. I have a quiz tomorrow in my mathematical statistics course. I have an odd sense of calm about it. As though I am a gladiator, resigned to his fate. "Nos morituri te salutamus!" they would call out to Caesar.

Anyway, check out this (personal) lubricant add. It's beautiful...and subtle. Look closely.

Beautiful Friends

My weekend with Jen and Erik was...quite remarkable. We had some beautiful weather which was conducive to walking, tossing the disc, and lounging. We witnessed a heated argument about fair trade coffee between two employees of a local java-hut called Brennen's. We saw the epitome of "condemned building" and were scared away by creepy noises coming from behind a closed door. We then ate at a local mafia run restaurant wherein the owner/cook exposed himself to our entire party.
This morning we ate at Jack and Benny's, and then the lovebirds flew my proverbial coop.

Here's a candid pic of the two on the beautiful OSU oval.



Thanks for coming down, guys!

Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?

I dreamt last night...

I was a detective working with my partner on a mysterious murder. A young black woman was abducted in broad daylight while walking from a barbershop to her high school gymnasium. The two buildings are less than 400 meters apart. For the duration of the case we were staying at someone's house in town, I think it was John Goodman, but I could be wrong. I think he was a cross between John Goodman and my dad.
One night I fall asleep at this man's house and I have a dream. That's right, in my dream I fall asleep and have a dream. When I wake up, my partner is doing Tai Chi in the living room. I ask him how he can wake up so early and he tells me no matter how early I wake up he'll always be awake before me. So as he's doing his Tai Chi he asks me about my dream.
I tell him that in this dream, a woman stands behind a table whereupon sits a giant, frosted cake. Her face is painted like a Geisha and she's holding a giant knife. My perspective is something like the camera on a cooking show. The woman then sticks the knife into the very edge of the cake and proceeds to peel off the frosting on the edge of the cake like it was an orange peel. The cake underneath is a deep yellow-orange color. She says something which implies it was my idea to remove the frosting because I want a piece of cake with no frosting. After she peels away all the frosting she plunges her face into the top of the cake. She lifts her head and I can see that her makeup is running down her face. The cake is absolutely ruined, smashed into little pieces. She reaches into the pile of cake and pulls out a flat, smooth crystal heart that's about 5 inches tall. Within this heart is etched (probably with lasers) the two masks that represent theater (the smiling mask and the frowning mask).
And then I woke up (from my dream within a dream). I told my partner this story and he asked me for more detail, implying that this dream had some great importance to our case.
I told him I couldn't remember anything else and then I woke up (for real).


Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream.
-E.A. POE

A visitation from Ann Arbor

Erik and Jen are coming down for the weekend!!!

I love visits from friends. It makes a week of studying, meetings, and teaching go that much faster.
Our agenda:

1. Play Cranium while drunk
2. Eat at Cafe Bella
3. Go to the bars and hit on underclassmen

and that's all I have so far.

Good morning Spacefans, wherever you are.

Self-Improvement

Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.

Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.

Maybe he unscrewed
the bulb from his apartment ceiling
so that passersby would not believe
a giant firefly was pulsing
its electric abdomen in 13 B.

Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue's exhausted oar.

Of course, the girlfriend dumped him:
met someone, apres-ski, who,
using nothing but his nose
could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.

Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.

Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.

The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.

So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.


-- Tony Hoagland

Everything Ends

It's over. I finished the final season, Season 5, of Six Feet Under.
The last episode ended with a montage set to the song "Breathe me" by Sia. Wether it was the music or the montage or a combination of the two, I'm not sure...but whatever it was, it absolutely devastated me. Not many works of fiction have affected me that deeply. Yeah, good show.

-SP

of mice and mollusks

Today was a good day.

For an interesting debate on the ethical implications of intent vs. result, check out the Falconers' blog:
http://alexanderica.blogspot.com/

For an incredibly funny flash cartoon check out
http://www.ultimateshowdown.org/

Other than that, I've got nothing.
May the universe support you in all your best intentions.

-Sprocketplug

A debt of gratitude...

O.k. here's the deal. I owe Erik Johnson a huge debt of gratitude for introducing me to Radiohead. I don't know where I'd be right now without their musical genius. So, Erik, I publicly (well, kind of publicly) thank you. You are like a golden god unto my musical awareness.

Also, in honor of Dr. MLK Jr. Day, we all ought to be nice to one another.

"I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land."

-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Friday the 13th

It's dark, stormy and I'm going out to the bar with Dan and a bunch of the firsties. Who knows, maybe I'll find enlightenment along the way. At the very least I hope to find a little alcohol to soak my troubled psyche.

Egesegedre.

intelligently design this, buddy.

I was reading an article that was posted on Slashdot.org yesterday. The article stated that scientists have discovered the mechanisms by which a honey bee flies. No big deal, you say. Well, probably not, but the article pointed out that one argument used by proponents of intelligent design is "Science can't be that good, it can't even explain how bees fly."
I really don't like this type of reasoning. This is called God of the Gaps...or something like that. That is, God's will/plan/presence can be seen in the unexplained phenomenon we encounter. Before we had a theory of gravitational attraction, people may have believed "this ball falls toward to the earth, because God wills it." Or "birds fly because god wills it." Now we have complex theories of gravitation and fluid dynamics that rely on natural law to explain these phenomena. Does that mean God somehow shrunk after the discovery of these laws/theories?
One of the first days of my intro psychology class at st. olaf I asked Dr. Huff, "Does a complete understanding of the functions of the brain preclude the existence of a soul." He had an articulate response that I don't remember verbatim, but he talked about God in the gaps and how it is folly to force God into those crevacies.
Doesn't faith exist without validation and vindication? Isn't part of the definition of faith a strong belief that needs not be supported with rational or tangible evidence?

Help me out here.

we remember thee, zion

I'm listening to Don McLean's "Babylon."

By the waters
The waters
Of Babylon.

We lay down and wept
And wept
For thee Zion.

We remember thee
Remember thee
Remember thee, Zion.

I remember the first time I heard this song. I was probably 12 or 13 and I bought the Don McLean cd for the title track "American Pie." I listened to that track and that track alone for about a week. Later, I put the cd into my stereo as I was going to bed and I let it run through the rest of the tracks. As I was drifting off to sleep this track started...and it broke my heart. It was so hauntingly beautiful. It makes me ache as if I lost something I never had. Like remembering a grief that was never yours. May we all find the courage to lay down and weep.

Macworld!!!

Steve Jobs starts his keynote address at 9:00am Pacific time, that's 12:00pm Eastern for those of us in Ohio.

This is like Christmas for all the mac fanatics out there. What will Papa Steve bring us this year?

everyone hail to the pumpkin song

This was the christmas for figurines. Falconer sent me this totally trippy Avenging Unicorn set and my brother sent me a wicked cool The Nightmare Before Christmas set. Here are some pictures of the TNBC set:

Off to the theater

Greetings from Castle Spreagle.

James and I are fixin' to go out to eat and then catch a showing of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe." I'm excited to see the film.

um...yeah...sorry I don't have any stories about prostitutes or zany misadventures in downtown columbus.

Ave atque vale!

Beta Zed here I come!

Oh, hells yes warp engines!!!!

With wings on his feet

James is coming to visit!!!!!!
He'll arrive today, at 8:30pm Eastern Time. This will mark the second occassion that James has blessed me (and Ohio) with his presence. What a guy!
Leave a comment for James and let him know how amazing he is...or send a cash donation to:

Give James a New BMW
c/o Peter Sprangers
555 Harley Drive #1
Columbus, OH 43202

Oh, and good luck to Andy who will be spending the rest of January in South Africa! You gotta love that kid.

-SP

mathematical immortality

Looks like Missouri University have found the next largest Mersenne prime.

"The number that the team found is 9.1 million digits long. It is a
Mersenne prime known as M30402457 -- that's 2 to the 30,402,457th
power minus 1."

I called them last week with the number 17, but they said they were looking for something a little larger. Guess they weren't kidding.
[[[update 01-05-06: n.b. 17 is not a Mersenne prime.]]]

Also, I have just beaten Final Fantasy VII.
The victory is bittersweet. My heart swells with pride to know that I, Corwin, have defeated the evil Sephiroth and saved the planet from a horrible destruction. But what shall I do now? For what goal shall I focus my attentions and near limitless power? Will there ever be a more worthy adversary than the god-like Sephiroth? Truth be told, I leveled up pretty intensely before the final battle and that poor shmuck only took two attacks before dropping like an inebriated freshman. He was all "I'm going to cast my Supernova Summon and do 5,000 points of damage." and I was all "I eat Supernovae for breakfast, you ninny." and then he was all "Oh, crap." and I was all Omnislash!!!! slice, whack, skewer, chop, slash, THWACK. And down he fell like the aforementioned underclassman. Long live the fighters!

Is all that we see or seem...

Last night I dreamt that Mikaela and I were US government trained assassins, sent to kill Pol Pot at the height of the Khmer Rouge's dominance. Through cunning and ruthless tactics, we completed our mission and escaped on a supersonic jet airliner.


In an unrelated note, I watched "Eternal Sunshine..." this weekend (hence the inspiration for the title of my blog) and I truly believe that Charlie Kaufman is one of the greatest screenwriters of all time. That film was written from a place of such wisdom and honesty. I feel like the entire film is an offering.

Hesitation...one-love

Lynne and I agree, blogs are an odd thing.
What does one write in a blog? Do I tell you the details of my day? Do you care about those details? Do I use this as a sounding board for my deepest thoughts and darkest desires? How personal can one get on a blog?
So, I hesitate to start down this slippery slope of blogdom.
But the fact remains, I came here. I signed up for a blog. I was sent for. We'll see how this develops.