ohmygodohmygodohmygod

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is coming to OSU!!!!
http://www.osu.edu/features/2006/vonnegut/

For those of you not familiar with his work...you are utterly insane. He's one of the greatest authors I've ever read. His most famous work, Slaughterhouse Five, starts with the utterly provocative line: "All this happened, more or less." It's a quasi-autobiographical portrait of a man who has lost chronological perspective. One of the key events in the story is Vonnegut's recollection of the fire bombing of a German city called Dresden during WWII. For those of you who think the Allied forces were models of righteous valor, think again. The allies were involved in numerous acts of terrorism against the German peoples, most (if not all) of which are, of course, never taught in high school history.
Do a google search for bombing of dresden or the like and you'll see what I mean.

Anyway, I'm abso-freaking-lutely thrilled that he's coming to OSU. The last time I saw him was on the Daily Show about a month ago. he was looking quite aged, but he seemed as quick witted as ever.

Another note:
Vonnegut called WWII: "The world's second unsucessful attempt to commit suicide."
you gotta love that.


Leave a note and tell me your favorite Vonnegut novel!

a very mexican birthday

I'm heading out to celebrate my friend Victor's birthday. We're going to El Vaquero (spanish for The Vaquero) for dinner.
Victor is a really great guy. A real stand-up character. We're going to a Mexican restaurant because Victor IS Mexican....well, he was born in Wisconsin but both of his parents are from Mexico City, so he's ethnically Mexican. Anyway....

Um...

here's a picture of a dancing eggplant.

frickin' frickers

I just made up a post with pictures and insightful comments on the state of the world...but then I hit the back button instead of "hide preview" and it was lost. utterly lost. Damn you Gibbs free energy!!!

I'll try to reconstruct the aforementioned post. Until then, this is all you get. Take it or leave it.

Love always,

The Plug

Hi.

Not much to report.
I took my mathematical statistics midterm today. It went pretty well. I'm 95% confident that I passed.

Yeah. That's it.

what?

What do you people want from me????

I guess I do have another piece of news:
I'm going to Cambodia for spring break. That'll be cool.

w00t!

-SP

Alligators in fishbowls of liquor

Hi.

We (and by we I mean I) just got back from the bars (and by bars I mean bar). We drank multicolored liquors out of fishbowls. we got to keep the alligators floating in the fishbowls. the bar is called the Ugly Tuna Saloona. fun name.
I called Falconer. Falconer, lemme know what you thought of my voicemail.

Um....i think that's it. they didn't play the electric slide even though I asked the DJ and he nodded appreciatively.

Jessica's friend Elizabeth was here from Washington, DC. which reminds me...why did they name a state Washington. Now we always have to say "Washington state...." that's a real drag. why couldn't they have picked some other name. I mean, it's not like it's too hard to name a state. Anyone can name one. Just call it...like...new something. New York...or New Jersey. As long as there's an old one you can have a new one. who's with me?????

also, let me go on the record that I, too, am against human-animal hybrids.

Unless you can make a sexy woman look like a jungle cat. Like...oh...i don't know...CHEETARA!!!!. Lemme find a picture for you guys...




sooooo hot










she was my first love, you know.

39 hours and counting....

I need sleep. The fact is undeniable. The evidence is irrefragable. The want is inconceivable.

But still I have unfinished work...and miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep.

-SP

The disillusionment of 6 O'Clock

FATHER LAWRENCE
Young son, it argues a distemper'd head so soon to
bid good marrow to thy bed: or if not so, then
here I hit it right, our Romeo hath not seen his bed
tonight.

ROMEO
The last is true; the sweeter rest was mine.


Ahhh, what sweeter rest than spending the night finding complete sufficient statistics and grading 135 homeworks?
What tenuous threads of sanity remain as rosy fingered dawn pulls itself over the horizon? We shall see...

Good morrow to all.

-SP

Intelligent Design Revisited

Ole was gone for a month and I think his comment was consumed by the vicious Jabberwocky that is time. here was his reply to my post on Intelligent Design. It's so good I wanted you all to get a chance to see it.

Ole said...

Sorry. Coming to this a little late...no one may ever even find it!

Oh well.

I agree that faith (and here I speak not generically but of what I
would refer to as my religious faith) necessarily involves
irrationality and intangibility, but my experience of it is not as a
state of persistent or willful ignorance, of grasping on to a set of
tenets in the face of all logic to the contrary. (Though I do not deny
that it is this way for many)

Instead, I find faith a far more complex mixture of the rational and
the irrational, of the tangible and the intangible. It is a means of
making sense of the world that tries to feel beyond what it is we see,
hear, taste, touch and smell but a means that should NEVER ignore what
we sense.

For me, faith is s tension between feeling and being felt, grasping
and being grasped, holding and being held. Never is it merely a willed
act--something one undertakes as a personal project. As in "I will
have faith!" It is undertaken in community, as people (not person).
And because its matrix is the relationships between people, it does
not fall victim to 'god-of-the-gaps' reduction, because the capacity
for human interrelationship within and between communities (given our
extraordinary individual uniqueness) seems quite endless.

Unless of course we all came into existence a few minutes ago--or
that we are all merely figments of pete's imagination...
-----------------------------------------------------

I think I subscribe to the "we are all part of Pete's imagination" school of thought.

Thanks for the comment, Ole. As always, your insights are valued like rain on Arrakis.

Hidden advertising

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?