t-minus two weeks

One more week of class, a couple finals, and then it's a much deserved ten day break before summer classes start.

For now, Jen and Erik are driving to Columbus to visit yours truly!!!

You gotta love those kids.

Mama said there'd be days like this...

Word up, my homies?

I had a bad day. You know what cheers me up when I'm having a bad day? The Justice League of America.

I don't know...even the Justice League are having a difficult time pulling me up from this mood.
Tell you what. Why don't you post your favorite "pick me up" song so that I can make a feel good playlist for myself.
Thank you in advance.

Twenty-Five

Hey kids.

Well, it's official. I'm 25 years old. I'd like to give a shout out to Karen Grumstrup, my biological mother. I'd also like to give a shout out to Mark Sprangers, my biological father. Without those two people I may have never existed. Finally, I'd like to give some props to Alex. Without his amazing show of self-restraint, I would have been killed in numerous gruesome (yet creative) ways.

Peace out, y'all.

-The Plug

Petrus

also best website ever

http://www.peepresearch.org/index.html

I know that easter was three days ago, but can't we all still enjoy watching Peeps dissolve in Phenol?

Cheers,

SP

best website ever

Dudes,

My friend Bernhard (a.k.a. The German) sent me this from Deutschland.

http://peter.sprangers.youaremighty.com/

Sooo cool.

Happy Easter!!!

What better way to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ than by doing statistics while wearing bunny ears.

Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?

Maybe I'm overestimating my blog's popularity...but I was expecting a lot more than two Fibonacci poems! Thanks to the creative individuals who posted. I'm guessing the second one was Johnsoep@stolaf.edu?

Anyway, please post more!!!!

I love you all.

Fibs

Check this out!
http://gottabook.blogspot.com/2006/04/more-fibbery.html

Poetry based on the Fibonacci sequence? Can you think of anything that would excite me more? No.

For those of you not familiar with old Fibonacci, he is most famous for a recursive arithmetic sequence that was inspired by rabbit breeding (i kid you not). You set the first value=0 and the second value =1 then any number in the sequence is defined as the sum of the previous two values in the sequence (i.e. recursively defined). so it goes
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...
you can also set the first two values to 1 and 1 and it'll work out the same way (obviously). So here's what I want, I want you all to write poems and post them here. they must be of the form
1 syllable
1 syllable
2 syllables
3 syllables
5 syllables
8 syllables

like a haiku, only different.

The fibonacci sequence is truly a remarkable thing because it shows up a lot in naturally occuring phenomena. For instance, If we take the ratio of two successive numbers in Fibonacci's series, and we divide each by the number before it, the sequence converges to the golden ratio, Phi=1.618034. The spines around a pineapple follow the Fibonacci sequence as do the seeds in a sunflower. Pretty cool if you ask me.

so here's my contribution:

math
poems
so hot
so sexy
build the foundation
of transcendent joyous rapture

o.k. you guys can do better. post away!!!!

you gotta love the PEPY kids

On Cambodia

These are a few of the children of the PEPY school. These are the faces I will never forget. These are the individuals who now have the chance to receive an education thanks to the efforts of my friends Greta and Daniela.
For the past 4 or 5 months I have been helping these women by maintaining their website (www.pepy.org). I have been doing this as a favor for Greta and, honestly, while working on the projects that came down the pike, I never really thought about what the PEPY Ride was doing. In my defense, it's difficult to think of a school in a place you have never been and mentally picture the children of a race you have never seen. But when the opportunity arose for me to visit this foreign land, I jumped at the chance.

Here are some pictures:



The walkway to the temple of Angkor Wat.

---

Preah Neak Pean

---

Preah Khan

---

Beng Mealea


Our unofficial guide through Beng Mealea

---

These are a few of my 200+ photos. These were all from the three days we spent "templing" outside of Siem Reap. The last night I spent in Cambodia I went to a traditional Khmer wedding. Actually, it was the third and last day of a traditional Khmer wedding. The third day is dedicated to eating, drinking, dancing, and drinking. I didn't take my camera with but I'm trying to get some pictures that Kristian (one of the PEPY Riders) took. The hostess of our guesthouse (http://www.earthwalkers.no/) was invited to the wedding and was instructed to bring all her western friends along. The bride and groom got a real kick out of the 12 or so white people who came to the wedding. In our group there were Norwegians, Canadians, Americans, and a Briton. Initially, we drew many furtive glances, but by the end of the night, strangers were walking up to our table to play their drinking games with us. And if the Norwegians I met in Cambodia were in any way representative of the general population of Norway, then it is truly a blessed land...and my next vacation will be to Oslo.

I'll leave it as this for now. In my next post I hope to write something about the Khmer (cambodian) people and my experiences with them as a whole.

Thanks for reading.

tongue tied

I've sat down several times to start writing about my trip...but my words fail me. I don't even know where to begin. Cambodia has touched me so deeply. The people I met and the places I visited. My time with Greta and meeting the other members of the PEPY Ride...
I'll sit down tonight and try to work something out...and least start somewhere. Maybe I should try to break it into smaller, more manageable pieces like the venerable Andrew Olaf.

Sorry to keep you all in suspense.

stateside...

I'm back. I'll be posting soon.

-SP

Consistently Sexy

Click on the image to get a larger version.

What you see before you is a display of the astonishing (yet true) mathematical statistical prowess of one Peter E. Spangers.

Love from Ohio,

Peter

What do Kurt Vonnegut and Mila Jovovich have in common?

It was pretty amazing to see the master (Kurt Vonnegut) in the flesh. It's difficult to describe him...or even what I thought of him. his oddly rhetorical and oftentimes flippant style of discourse was a little disconcerting. I feel like he didn't say anything of substance for the hour or so that he sat and chewed the proverbial fat.
He made more than few comments along the lines of "George Bush is really dumb." which made the crowd cheer wildly, but left me feeling a little cheated. I mean, that's hardly insightful and it certainly isn't constructive. When asked what we can do to make a difference he said, and I'm paraphrasing here, that it doesn't really matter since the end of the world is neigh. I'm not sure if he was being prosaic for some effect...but if so, it was lost on me.
So...it was good to see and hear him in person, but I think he may be reaching the end of his public appearance lifespan.

Also a bit disappointing was the movie Ultraviolet starring Mila Jovovich. Let me begin by explaining that there are few movies I have ever watched during which I repeatedly say to myself "Dear God, let this be over." And this is coming from the guy who thinks Starship Troopers was a brilliantly wrought film (I'm looking at you, Martinson). Ultraviolet was plagued with horrid characters, cheap and unsuccessful attempts at emotionality, and a palpable desperation to make the movie seem epic. To all moviemakers out there, please, PLEASE do not play gentle music and shoot soft focus close ups and assume we're going to be crying our eyes out...especially when in the last scene, our heroine shoves a broken samurai sword blade through a man's forehead (after killing nearly 100 of his closest friends). Also, this does NOT constitute good dialogue:

Bad Guy:
You got hemophage blood on me. Oh, it's on.

(10 to 30 second dramatic pause)

Mila Jovovich:
Yeah
(10 to 30 second dramatic pause)
it is.



And this is one of more florid dialogues. It upsets me because virtually anyone, ANYONE, I know can write dialogue better than this. Stick Falconer, Nelson, and me in a room with nothing more than two 1 pound bags of skittles and a word processor and we're going to generate something that eclipses this garbage!

*sigh*


-The Plug

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.