How I Met Josh Radnor

I know I've broken the blogging world record by posting twice in three days, but try to keep up.



Josh Radnor, star of the hit television series "How I Met Your Mother" (take a minute to chuckle at the title of this post) was in Bexley Ohio tonight to premiere his new movie HappyThankYouMorePlease. Mr. Radnor, a native of Bexley returned to the theater he used to visit as a child. During his speech before the movie he said "I wouldn't be making movies if it weren't for this theater." All in all he seems like a really nice guy and, perhaps surprisingly, very much like Ted Mosby, the character he plays in How I Met Your Mother (don't chuckle again, that's just condescending). So where do I fit in amongst the rich and powerful patrons who attended this showing? Well, it just so happens that my girlfriend is the Director of the Bexley Public Library. And it just so happens that the president of the library board is Alan Radnor, Josh Randor's father. So girlfriend and I attend the premiere (spoiler alert: the movie is freaking awesome), then we go to the afterparty. We see Josh Radnor talking to people, laughing, hugging, and being an all around nice guy.
Let me pause here to say that apart from a brief wave from Robert Guillaume when I was very very little, I have never met a famous person. So girlfriend and I were waiting to met Josh Radnor and I'm getting nervous. My heart is pounding and I'm thinking of what I should say and then girlfriend walks up to him and shakes his hand. The music is loud so Josh Radnor bends over to catch her name. She tells him her name and he says "Oh yes! I've heard a lot of great things about you." This hot-shot up and coming star of television and film has heard great things about my girlfriend. It's true, she's a rockstar.
They chat a little bit and then he looks over at me. Extends his hand and says "Hi, I'm Josh." So simple, so kind and unpretentious. I smile and shake his hand.

And that is how I met Josh Radnor. If you haven't seen his tv show, you owe it to yourself. It plays pitch perfectly to my (and probably your) generation, plus Alyson Hannigan is hot. The movie HappyThankYouMorePlease will be in theaters in February.

Sprocketplug Out

Summer Time

So here's what's been going on in my life.

August was a busy month. I gave a presentation on the work I've been doing this summer regarding some survey design research involving propensity scores. I tested for and received my yellow belt in hapkido.

Finally, I took my second qualifying examination for my Ph.D. program. If I pass this exam the next stage is passing a candidacy exam before starting work on my dissertation. Luckily this exam was something of a final hurdle. The two qualifying examinations act as a weeding out process for the department. If you fail the exams, they send you packing. If you pass the exams, however, you're almost guaranteed to graduate. The department doesn't give you your candidacy exam until they think you can pass it.

The qualifier was an ordeal, but it's over and I'm starting to wind down from all the stress. I still get a knot in my stomach when I think about it, but for the next week (until I get the results) I'm going to try to push it out of my mind.

On an unrelated note, I took my car in today for an oil change and had them look into a noise I was hearing from the passenger side front suspension. Turns out something or the other was broken and they didn't want me driving it for fear of a tire puncture during a hard turn. So I picked up a car from Budget which I'll be driving until the part comes in and they install it (a couple of days on the outside).

The car is fairly new Dodge Avenger. I like how the exterior looks, kinda badass, but it doesn't handle like it looks it might. Looks like a dolphin, handles like a manatee. I think it should trademark that in case dodge wants to use it in advertisements.

I had an "interesting" conversation with another patron at Carmax while my car was being inspected. I was sitting in the waiting area and SportsCenter was on. I was reading "With the Lightenings" a great novel by David Drake, and this dude sits down by me and starts commenting on the story being covered by ESPN. The story was about Roger Clemens. I don't follow sports, but I do remember the congressional hearings on performance enhancing drugs. Why was Roger Clemens returning to Congress?

From the LA Times:

The charges stem from Clemens' testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in 2008. Clemens, who was mentioned multiple times in the Mitchell Report, told the committee he had "never taken steroids or HGH."

So this guy said "You think the government has more important things to do then bring Roger Clemens back."

I glanced up and he was looking right at me. I think he's missing the point, but I just shrug and go back to my novel. So he said "I mean it costs them hundreds of thousands of dollar to do this and that could be money better spent making jobs for people." I was about to say something, but thought otherwise and said "Yeah, probably." And back to my book.

A few minutes later he says "I mean I've been a cop for 20 years and there's tons of more dangerous drugs out there. Heroin, cocaine, and these guys get all worked up because baseball players want to make themselves a little bigger."

Finally I said

"Well...I agree that congress probably had better things to do than investigate drug use in major league baseball, however, Roger Clemens is under fire now because he most likely committed several acts of perjury. Whether or not you believe HGH and steroids are bad, and regardless of what you think of the original investigation, the man gave false testimony to the United States Congress, and that cannot stand."

The man looked at me for a few seconds then said "Yeah, but there are tons of drugs that are more dangerous that you can get on the street."

I opened my mouth, then I closed my mouth and went back to my novel. The voice of my good friend Fast Eddie in my ear "Pick your battles, dude. Pick your battles."

the way of coordinated power

Much has happened in the past month. Spring quarter ended, Summer quarter began, I moved in with The Fighting Librarian, and I started (in earnest) a Korean martial art called Hapkido.

Some of you may know that I tried my hand (no pun intended) at the Japanese martial art, Aikido, a while back. The philosophy of Aikido was extremely interesting to me. The best way I can describe Aikido is that it is a non-violent martial art. It emphasizes balance, coordinated motion, and respect for your attacker. Your goal in Aikido is to take your opponents energy and us it against him/her. It rarely, if ever, teaches strength vs. strength. Anecdotally, I once practiced with a woman who was probably 50 years old, probably 5' tall and a biscuit over 100 pounds. Using some simple techniques, she threw my 200 pounds around the mat like i was a rag doll. We were taught ways to redirect the attacker's force and use that same energy to subdue, pin, or generally immobilize the attacker. There were ways to make the techniques more unpleasant for the attacker, but in general it felt like you were putting your opponent to bed. You took their energy and used it to put them on the ground. Then you applied a wrist or arm lock until they felt uncomfortable and asked you to stop (tapped out). Then you released and backed away. Aikido is often called a soft form, or a soft martial art. If someone throws a punch, you don't try to block it, you simply blend with it, redirecting the energy and putting it to your own use. Since you never meet force head on with more force, Aikido is called a soft form or a soft martial art.
A practitioner of a hard martial art once said that fighting a practitioner of Aikido was like trying to fight a ghost.
There are several Dojos that teach aikido in the greater columbus area, but I decided to join The Fighting Librarian's Dojang where I knew some people and my friend Sam wanted to start at the same time.

Now, Hapkido is very similar to Aikido as you can probably tell from the name. The difference being Hapkido incorporates some hard forms and also some weapons training. On one of the first days after I joined, we were doing some techniques that are similar to Aikido. In Aikido, if someone were grabbing your wrist, you can turn their arm, take their balance, and put them on the ground. In Hapkido, we learned to turn the attacker's arm, take his balance....but now you take his arm across your leg, strike down to shatter the elbow, then strike across to break the jaw. Therein lies the difference.
In Aikido, you leave your attacker in a position where he doesn't want to you attack you again. In Hapkido, you leave your attacker in a position where he isn't physically able to attack you again.

I'm very much enjoying my practice as it gives me an escape from my otherwise sedentary lifestyle. That, and it gives me a better chance against Fast Eddie's attack ninjas. I take my yellow belt test August 13th. I'll let you all know how it goes.

-SP

When does the searching stop?

 "Bang Pop" is in the running to be the next Freshman on MTV's Freshman 5. 

Vote for their video here:http://freshmen.mtvu.com/

This picture is awesome.

From the time I was a little boy I always imagined what it would be like to have my house filled with water. Not in the flash flood/my life is ruined, kind of way. I just wondered what it would feel like to swim through my.....
UGH!
I just got stuck in a 20 minute "conversation" with my neighbor. She has two dogs Bella and Petey. I have my back door opened to get a breeze and I heard her say "Peter?" I thought she was talking to her dog, but then a minute later I heard her say "Hey Peter?" so I poked my head out and said, "Marci? Are you talking to me?" and she said "No, my dog. But how are you?"
Now, I try to avoid my neighbor because although she is nice and well intentioned she communicates as though most of her brain has been burned away by a decades long addiction to crystal meth...probably because as far as I can tell her brain has been burned away by a decades long addiction to crystal meth.
She talks and she talks and she wanders from one subject to another, so "we" start out talking about her day and how she was cleaning houses with her daughter (who is pretty cool) and then I get to learn about her former 80 year old boyfriend in cleveland who retired at 51 and I get to hear about how she loves the jewish community up there because they are such big tippers during Christmas.
Me: "You mean Hanukah?"
Marci: "What?"
Me: "Well, the Jews usually-."
Marci: "And you know we used to clean houses of all the rich doctors and they didn't live in really nice neighborhoods and my son is going to fix my car because someone hit my car when it was parked on the street and..."

And so I stand and watch her little dogs bound around our shared backyard and I listen for the slightest pause so I can say "I really need to get back in..." but there is no such pause. The woman must be circularly breathing or something. I just can't interrupt people, at least not people I don't know very well. When telemarketers call, when greenpeace comes knocking at my door... as long as they keep talking I keep listening.

Eventually I get a word in and tell her I have to go back inside to do school work.
Marci: "Oh Sure, I understand."
Peter opens his door and gets one foot inside.
Marci: "So how is school, you acing everything?"
Peter: "Yep, school is going very well. Well goodnight!"
Marci: "How much do you have left before you graduate."
Peter: "Probably a couple of years. Have a nice night."
Marci: "That's great. Are you ready to....

UGH. Finally I have to interrupt her. I apologize profusely but I REALLY have to get some more work done. She stares at me blankly and I take this as my cue to run inside and throw the deadbolt.

I will never, ever try crystal meth.

Hoppy Birsdai to me

If you get the reference, you're as a big a gamer as me.

Blogging Under the Influence

For the past, oh, six days now I have been feeling ill. Symptoms fall in the range of your common garden-variety virus, sore throat, sinus congestion, runny nose, headaches, fevers, chills, speaking in tongues etc...
So I've been stocking up on vitamins, fruits, soups, drugs, throat lozenges and other tradition cures/alleviations. I bought a packet of NyQuil liquid caps to help me sleep since that seems to be the most difficult thing for me to do when I'm sick.
Last night, I was lying on my couch feeling miserable and self pitying and watching Firefly actor/producer commentary. It made me laugh, which made me feel a little better. At about 9:30, I decide that I want to hit the sack early, so I crawl upstairs to my bathroom and rummage around my medicine closet. Let me say here that I have enough medical supplies to support the third mobile infantry and enough drugs to stun a team of oxen. As I'm looking through my many and varied pharmaceuticals (some purchased over the counter, some prescription use only) I realize I have left my NyQuil liquid caps downstairs. I did however, notice a bottle of NyQuil liquid.

The only problem is that this particular bottle of cherry flavored NyQuil expired in November of 2008. Now, I know what you're thinking, surely I just went downstairs and got the packet of freshly purchased nyquil liquid caps and took those. Surely I dumped that half used bottle of liquid death down the drain. *ahem*
So I measure out the appropriate dosage from the Cherry NyQuil and throw it down the hatch. At this point I can safely say that the flavor engineers over at NyQuil have a really good sense of humor. Calling this product "cherry flavored" is a sin equivalent to filling grenadine bottles with hamster vomit and selling them in bulk.

Now, I know what you're thinking, and in my defense, let me just say that drinking two year old NyQuil is not as crazy as it sounds. I've had a clinical trials course and I know something about what happens after the best used by date on pharmaceuticals. Usually, the product simply loses efficacy. The effects of the drug are lessened not changed.
So I crawl into bed with the taste of rodent upchuck still on my tongue and settle in for a nice long sleep....

I wake up at about 11:00pm and I'm groggy and dizzy but otherwise comfortable. In my semi-conscious state I ask myself, why did I wake up? Surely, the medication didn't work. So I stumble out of bed and go downstairs. It takes me a while to find the liquid caps (because I'm drugged out of my gourd). I crack them open and take the full the dose. This is where things get a little weird.


I fall asleep again and my dreams become vivid and grand. I can see geometric shapes laid out against a pastoral landscape and I hear the voices of Joss Whedon, Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, and Ron Glass. They are talking and talking and they won't stop talking and when I wake up 2 hours later I can still hear them talking. That's right, I am awake and I can still hear the disembodied voices of the men doing firely commentary. I stumble into the bathroom and everywhere I look, there are shapes, mostly rectangles with dots at the vertices. The voices keep talking and the shapes are sticking to the walls and I stumble back into bed. I wake up two hours later and the voices are now a cacophony in my head. I try to close my eyes again but the room spins and I can see citadels built upon layered and interlocking rectangles with dots at the vertices. The noise increases until I feel my head is going to split open. Why won't they shut-up, I can't sleep unless they shut-up. As the voices reach a crescendo, I bolt upright and then there's silence.
I'm covered in sweat and my heart is pounding, but the room is cool and silent. I take a few deep breaths and fall back down to my pillow. As I close my eyes, all is quiet, but I see a single rectangle, outlined in silver, with blue dots at the vertices floating in the middle of my mind's eye.

An Evening with That Author Guy

The Fighting Librarian and I spent the evening at a book signing/reading with one of my favorite authors, Christopher Moore. There's nothing like hearing an author wax prosical to make you want to fire up the old blog.

He was supposed to read an excerpt from his new novel Bite Me: A love story (linked on the site above), but ended up just chatting with the audience for an hour and half. He told stories, talked about his new found fame, and then fielded questions from all the weirdos in the audience.

It was a really really good time. He was witty and self deprecating, funny and sincere. To be short, I would really like it if he and I became friends. I've actually written him a few fan letters and was amazed when I got replies...within 30 minutes. I'm not kidding. I wrote the guy after I read Lamb and not even half an hour later I got a response wherein he commented on my email. That is to say, unless he has some dastardly clever reply program, I think he actually read and responded to my email. Now that's a man who's dedicated to his fans.

For those of you who have not read Mr. Moore, I highly recommend picking up some of his stuff. Lamb is spectacular, but it's even better if you're familiar with some of the christian mythology. A Dirty Job stands out as one of the best and most hilarious books I've ever read. I put it up there with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (though it's a different kind of humor).

I also, just recently, purchased a DROID. You may know if it as the only phone/operating system that comes close (in terms of popularity) to the iPhone. Now, you all know I'm a HUGE fan of Apple and the Macintosh computer. I learned to type on an Apple II gs and my first personal computer was beige Macintosh G3. I've had a clamshell iBook and powerbook titanium, and my computer right now is an aluminum iMac. I've loved them all. However, when it came time to get a new phone I had two reservations when it came to apple. 1) I like having a physical keypad for typing. Something about the iPhone touchscreen keypad drove me bonkers. I would start to twitch and mutter curses in german. 2) Apple's business practice vis a vis the App store is just short of despotic. I don't like the closed door iron fist acceptance rejection policy and I don't like that I can't make my own app and load it on my phone. Apple has always kept tight reigns on their hardware/software, but at some point you begin to stifle creativity. Enter the Android operating system. Made by a somewhat less despotic Google to be an open source, pretty GUI whereon you don't need to void your warranty to upload any app your tech savvy grandmother just made.

The Motorola Droid, the flagship of the Android fleet, has a slideout qwerty keyboard and an open source philosphy I can get behind.

So far, I love it! I've never had a true "smart phone" before and I love how it syncs up with gmail and gmail calendar. The screen is big and beautiful and the apps are wicked fun. There's even an app that let's you download public domain literature.

O.k. that's all that's on my mind for now. I hope you all are happy and well.

=SP=

The long dark tea-time of the soul.

Hi All!

It's spring break here in buckeye country and I'm sure you're all wondering what's going on in the life of one Sigmund J. Sprocketplug.

The quarter ended fairly uneventfully, but it marks the last quarter of full time "real" classes. I'll need to take one or two more electives over the next year, but other than that it's just reading classes and dissertation credits (provided I pass my second qualifier).
About that, I take my second qualifier, which should be much less scary than the first, in August. Please send well wishes to sprocketplug@catlovers.com .

The biggest news of the moment comes from the realm of personal finance.

March was an expensive month for me mostly due to the crazy amount of money I owe(d) the United States government. I learned that my cocaine habit was not tax deductible and neither was the interest on my Faberge egg collection. Really, though, it was the fact that I do some freelance textbook editing and the publisher doesn't take out taxes before paying me.
I also got a speeding ticket in Indiana while on my way to Chicago to hear Free Energy rock the pants off some party people.
On top of that, during my last dental appointment, my DDS told me that my jaw is funny. It's a problem I've lived with my entire adult life

You see, when I bite down, my molars don't touch on the right side. Meaning I can only chew food on the left side of mouth. The dentist huffed and puffed a little and I was kind of "meh" but then he mentioned that over time I might develop arthritis in my jaw. Now, I'm not a doctor, but jaw arthritis doesn't sound like much fun. So I scheduled an appointment with ye ole apothecaries down at OSU orthodontics. A dental grad student looked in my mouth and said "your teeth don't touch on the right side of your mouth." Then an orthodontic resident looked in my mouth and said "your teeth don't touch on the right side of your mouth." Then an orthodontic specialist looked in my mouth and said "you have appendicitis." Then a nurse leaned over and whispered something in his ear and then he said, "your teeth don't touch on the right side of your mouth." He checked a little box that said "SURGERY" and sent me to a woman who told me how much I get to pay for them to break, saw, move, and screw my jaw. Spoiler: It's a lot of money.
Inspired by that wonderful christmas tale, The Gift of the Magi, I'm going to sell all my teeth to pay for my jaw surgery. They'll just grow back, right?


If I do get the surgery, it'll probably happen this summer. If/When that occurs I will be sure to blog about the whole experience. This will include audio recordings of what it sounds like when you try to sing "Surrey with a fringe on top" with your jaw wired shut. Before and after x-rays. Pictures of the slivers of left over adamantium that weren't used in the reconstruction process.

Snow Day!

Columbus Public Schools (including OSU) were closed today on  account of the Snowtorious B.I.G.
So the exam I was supposed to take today is rescheduled for Thursday and I have a full day to lounge about. Well, I spent the last two hours shoveling, but other than that...

Quick recap of the past couple months
 Modern Warfare 2:


And that's pretty much it.

I've been making some extra scratch as a tutor and I like it very much. There's something more satisfying about sitting with an individual than lecturing to a classroom. There are nuances of understanding and discovery that cannot be obtained when talking to 100 students. It's pretty easy work too, depending on which class I'm tutoring. I've taught the intro classes for so many years, I know the most common pitfalls and the best way to circumnavigate frustrations. Helping a student with Stats 135, I feel a little like The Player from Ros & Guil. He seems to know so much, but really it's just that he's "been here before" and the student can't figure out "the direction of the wind."

On a happy note, my old roommate from StOlaf is coming to Columbus for the weekend. And ye there shall be much playing of videogames and eating of pizza. I'm also trying to get together some people for a poker night, something we've never quite been able to do when he's visited.