clad in black...

I think I saw my first genuine NYC crackwhore today in the city, leaving a hospital on 12th. I can’t be sure, of course, but I mean… she was dressed like a whore… and she looked like she was on crack… what more evidence do you want?

In other news, you’ll note that… oblivious to the fact that nobody even really uses ICQ anymore… I’ve added that little “Look I’m Online!” ICQ doohicker over there to my sidebar, in the hopes that someday someone might chat with me. Actually, I’m seldom actually on ICQ anyway. (And neither are you, K. – so I don’t know what YOU are all excited about!)

Also, before I forget, thanks to all those readers who have added me to their link-lists and their “blog-rolls” and whathaveyou. I checked the “referring pages” stats on my sitemeter, and they really are generating some traffic. But a corollary to that is I’m seeing that visitors are coming here who I’ve never heard of… and not leaving notes… lurkers! The worst kind of readers! Come on, people… it’s time to pay the admission price.

# # # # # # # # # #

I know I’ve complained about this before, but it’s happening again… more evidence that I’m losing touch with music. I got my copy of Rolling Stone in the mail, and the feature story is about “summer concerts” and festivals and whatnot… mostly metal bands…. Metallica… Ozzfest… but there is this picture of and article on some black-clad guy calling himself “Davey Havoc” or some such shit, who is supposedly the lead singer for “AFI”.

Who?

Who the fuck is AFI? I thought that was the “American Film Institute”… you know “AFI’s 100 Best Movies.” I mean, it’s not uncommon for RS to feature a band I don’t listen to or don’t like… but it’s rare for them to have someone on the cover I’ve never even HEARD OF.

Old, old, old, I ‘m getting…

And I can tell he’s one of those guys… one of those “Ooooh look at my makeup look how scaaary I am” guys who pisses me off. Anybody who pretends their name is “Havoc” needs a good slap upside the head anyway. It’s like that fucking Marilyn Manson. There is nobody in music for whom I have LESS respect. And it’s not even because I think he’s a freak. Actually it’s because he’s not a freak… he’s just a dork. He thinks he’s Mr. Scary with his makeup and his contact lenses and his chrome teeth, but the second he starts talking, all you can think is… ”Yeah… aren’t you the kid who played Dungeons and Dragons in the cafeteria during lunch in the 8th grade?” He’s just a skinny nerdy dorky guy, who’s trying to hide the fact that he has no real personality by dressing up like a fucking clown. Maybe if you had any talent, or anything at all to SAY, you could make do without all the “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! I’M CONTROVERSIAL” bullshit.

Anyway… how out of touch am I with modern music? What “new album” am I most excited about? The new Led Zeppelin live compilation and DVD. And I hate myself for it… I didn’t WANT to want to buy it… fuck, it’s a 30 year old band. But now I’m reading all of these four-star reviews of it, and I figure…FUCK… ok, I’ll buy it dammit. I give up. I’m a demographic dinosaur… my finger is no longer on the pulse… I’m officially culturally irrelevant.

# # # # # # # # # #

This guy on the train is sleeping, and his snoring is making a sound like the creaky hull of an old wooden ship. It’s like the “Pirates of the Caribbean” in here. Or the “Mayflower” or something. Yo ho ho!

I was reading the Village Voice today, and flipping past all of the dominatrix and escort ads in the back, and it occurred to me… I wonder if the Matrix II has had any impact on the dungeon business? Any upswing in the number of guys looking for someone to dress up in PVC and kick the fuck out of them like Carrie-Anne Moss? And one other thing… it really bugs me when journalists and movie reviews get this wrong, and talk about Trinity dressed up in latex, or leather… it’s quite obvious that all of her outfits are black PVC vinyl – polyvinylchloride… not latex, and certainly not leather. Persephone’s outfit… THAT was latex. If you’re going to write about the kinky clothes, at least get it fucking RIGHT, people.

Well, I’m going to go write some emails or something. In have another entry I want to write about an interesting job ad I saw today, but it will have to wait. Later…

D.

operating the system…

Did I mention I got through to Apple Customer Relations last week? The most recent iBook problem, if you recall, was that I sent them a laptop with a 30Gb hard drive that had gone bad, and they happily and obliviously replaced it with a 20 Gb drive. D’oh! So the woman at customer relations had me fax her my original invoice… proving that I bought the computer from an authorized reseller WITH a 30GB HD installed, and she suggested that, just maybe, I could send the computer BACK and get a 30GB drive put back in. Well, horray! Of course that was about 5 days ago, and she hasn’t called me back. And it means I have to back up my whole fucking machine again, which I’ve become an absolute PRO at. And it means another week without my laptop. And…

In the time since the last “repair”, this fucking iLemon has developed TWO MORE significant hardware problems. First the CD tray refuses to eject… it just goes clik-clik-clik unless you push on it and tilt the computer up at a 45 degree angle to “dump” the CD out. And then the other day the power plug goes all wacky. When you plug the AC adaptor into the jack, the light comes on, then goes off – while making an absolutely HORRIFYING little electrical *bbbbzt-pop* sound. It took me about a half hour to get it working the other day… I finally got it by

p l u g g i n g…
i t…
i n…
v e r y…
s l o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o w l y y y y y y y y y y ….

God I hate this computer. My wife asked me the other day – “So… is it worth all this just for the “privilege” of being able to use the Macintosh operating system?” And I WANT it to be… but FUCK… from a hardware standpoint, this iBook is the worst computer I’ve ever owned.

Then contrast that nightmare with the computers in my basement… six desktop Macs, all ancient (in computer-terms anyway) all of which run like the Terminator. You can’t kill these things. Three of them I bought “dead”… took them home, took them apart, blew on some contacts, whacked the hard drives on their cases, and…. *ping*… they all started right up. Despite the fact that I abuse them and run them with their cases off…these machines are so reliable… so cool. I really need to put them to work. The only one “doing” anything is the one I gave to my daughter, but the others… I really need to get them into my office and give them jobs. I was thinking the other day… trying to figure out what to do with them for fun, and it hit me… what about trying to run Linux on one of them?? I’m a physicist after all… the only one at my University… I have to keep up appearances… keep that physics-geek-mystique about me. What better way than to have some kludged-together Franken-Mac sitting in the corner of my office running Linux – the Ultimate Geek OS! So I’m looking at different distributions, trying to find one that will run on these machines (9500’s upgraded to G3… and one 8500) I won’t bore you with the details… nothing worse than geeks talking about Linux…. but I’m having a tough time even getting started. I burned an install disk, and they won’t even recognize it as something to boot from. Grrrrr.

Then last night I remembered that failed experiment of the late 90’s – the “BeOS.” I actually got an Mac to boot that up years and years ago and played with it… it was pretty cool. I looked into it online, but the company has gone under, so it’s tough to get your hands on anymore. Some people are selling the final PowerPC release of the BeOS on eBay… I’ve got my eye on it. It might be worth $20 just to play with… just for the “What’s that?!” factor when people see it.

So finally, while I was messing with all of these “alternative OS” options I was booting up one of the 9500’s and looked at the screen and thought… wow, it looks so weird after looking at my iBook all day. Hell… MacOS 9 is an alternative operating system now!! In another year, OSX will be everywhere, and I can simply revel in the glorious, antiquated little icons of my Old School Mac and feel like I’m being plenty “alternative”. So I’ll definitely keep one of them “virgin”. But how cool would it be to get three of these babies up and running in my office…

9500/G3 running MacOS9…
9500 running Linux…
8500 running BeOS…

Not to mention the little Mac Classic up on a shelf running the AfterDark clock screensaver. That… my friends… is what a physics professor’s office should look like!

Dr. Dave

back on the train, yeah…

Science department meeting today, so I’m heading into the city. But the meeting isn’t until 1:30, so I’m taking a really late train… 9:40. It feels weird… it’s so warm and sunny… I’m so… awake. And I recognize the feel of that feeling… it’s like when you were a kid and you had a doctor’s appointment or something and you went in to school really late, like 11:00… and it’s the middle of the day and you know everybody else has been in there all day and you’ve been doing something else… I don’t know why, but it’s a really good feeling.

It turns out the thing with my students coming to visit didn’t work out after all. Two of them can’t get off work, and the third doesn’t want to come all the way out here alone. And as much as I complained about being weirded-out by the whole thing, now I’m kinda disappointed. I guess cuz it would have been nice to have been one of those professors… just once. Because I’m so NOT one of those professors, that I may not get the chance very often.

It’s nice to write on the train for a change… I don’t get to write many extended entries anymore, since I’m usually at home writing in the 20 minute silences between baby screams. I’m hoping my Chair schedules LOTS of these summer meetings!! I feel a little guilty, since my wife has a giant looming deadline on this philosophy book she’s editing, but I’ve been doing more than my share lately, so I’m not going to complain about the day off.

Funny Baby Story time. I was trying to get ready for work this morning and watch the kids at the same time, and the baby was all fussy… he wanted SOMETHING, and I didn’t know what he wanted. Sometimes it helps to just give him an “object”… it doesn’t matter WHAT… just something with a new and interesting shape that he can bang on. So I sat him on the floor in the bedroom and gave him my black leather belt, which he began happily banging and groping and jangling the buckle. I kept an eye on him to make sure he wasn’t going to eat it or whack himself in the head with the buckle or anything… he seemed fine… he was mouthing it and drooling on it a bit, but I didn’t give it much thought.

When I took it back from him, it looked as if it had been played with by an excited puppy. The end of it is chewed all to fuck. It’s a brand new belt!! I’d be pissed if it wasn’t so funny. It’s not like I don’t KNOW how hard he can bite with those two little teeth… he bites the fuck out of my finger all the time. But still… I didn’t think he’s be capable of mangling the fucking thing. No more playing with the belt, I think.

That’s about it on the homefront, I guess. Now I’m going to write an entry about my computers. Why? Cuz I signed up to be on this Mac-user journal blog-ring, and I want them to think I actually talk about my Macs from time to time. Which I do… right? Plus it HAS been occupying me quite a bit lately. So, for those faithful readers who get bored by my little computer rants… apologies

D.

there are two kinds of people in this world, blondie…

The past few nights when the baby has been tired, but not settled enough to fall asleep, I’ve been taking him downstairs to the basement to sit in the dark and watch ”The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” on DVD. God, what a perfect fucking film that is. I can watch it over, and over, and over. It’s THE iconic, archetypal western… fully realized. It is to westerns what the Matrix is to modern action films. Perfectly paced, visually stunning, with characters who are somehow both cartoonishly rendered and larger than life. Even its imperfections only ADD to its appeal. The out-of-sync overdubbed-overdubbed English over Italian over English?? Love that!! And don’t even get me STARTED on the soundtrack! The ONLY movie soundtrack I own on CD… two scenes in particular where the marriage of the soundtrack and the cinematography add up to a couple of the most stirring scenes ever filmed. The scene where Tuco races around the giant graveyard looking for the grave marker that conceals the cash box… the spinning blur of the camera, the haunting solo female voice, that crescendoes until it’s doubled by a trumpet fanfare… oh… And then the final three-way gunfight… probably the best movie fight scene ever in which nobody fucking MOVES for two and a half minutes… and the trumpet solos there give me goosebumps….

Maybe it’s just a guy thing… but this movie is …beyond words.

Dave (aka – “the scientist with no name”)

c'est finis...

Or however the fuck you spell it... French... jesus, what a nightmare of a language! Three days I spent in Paris, and I hated every minute of it. Ok... well... the Louvre was pretty cool...

But that's not what I wanted to talk about...

I'm done, done, done for the summer. My grades were DUE today and they are DONE today... with plenty of time to spare. Zippideedoodaah and all that. June. July. August. OFF. I always feel SO GOOD when grades are done. Students did pretty well overall... a little grade inflation involved maybe... I only gave out a couple of C's... and nothing lower... but, eh... grades... phbphbbtpt.... what does it really matter in the long run?

Anyway, I'm not really done with WORK for a while. I still have to go in to campus Thursday for a meeting. Then Friday I go to the Old School to take part in an annual debate. (The Philosophy teacher and I debate the question of whether or not computers will ever attain true "consciousness"! He concedes that I beat him the first two times. We'll see if he has any new tricks up his sleeve.) The bizarre addendum to Friday's debate is that two or three of my COLLEGE students found out about this debate and want to come see it. Now mind you the old high school I used to teach at is about three hours away from the new college I teach at. Maybe four hours. So the end result is that 2 or 3 of my college students are staying at my house on Thursday night. That is WAY over my usual teacher/student boundary line... I'm a little freaked out about it.

So, once that is over... I'm pretty much clear as far as honest-to-goodness WORK for the next few months. Of course I'll still BE working... planning courses, reading, working on my Oxford presentation... but nothing regimented or required. Of course, that only means that I get to watch the KIDS every day whil my wife picks up extra freelance clients. Perhaps teaching a summer course is in order for next year?!

-- d.

"whooom....whooom....whoom....

everyone in the house is sick and miserable and crabby, and even though i feel mostly better, the kids are driving me nuts and all day i've had this SOUND in my head... INSIDE my head, just this constant, low-pitched, rhythmically throbbing NOISE... it's like i can hear my own fucking BRAIN, I feel like Max Cohen in "Pi"... like i just need to take a fucking DRILL to my temple...





but other than that, everything's fine.


d.

t.g.i...over...

I haven’t had much time lately when I was both FREE to write and did NOT feel like shit AND had something I wanted to talk about. It takes quite the “convergence”, doesn’t it. The only reason I’m writing now is because it’s 6:00 AM and the baby won’t sleep.

The flu thing is about over, thank god. It’s been a shitty weekend, that’s for sure… Friday I gave a woozy, feverish lecture at the Old School, then drove to the Celtic shop in Southampton only to find the fucking place CLOSED. I even CALLED this time. You fucking… FUCK, how does this place stay in business?? So… the day before my anniversary and no fucking present. So I wrapped some candy jewelry with a note, and reprogrammed my cell phone with a mock message in my best Irish Brogue…

“Helooo, you’ve rreached A Cayltic Seecrret
our hoors arre, Fridee: nyoon until seeex,
Saturdee, nyoon until sayvin
and Soondee, nyoon until fourr.
But despite wha’ I’ve just sayed,
If ya’ come on Frridee, you’ll fine we’re clooosed.
Sorrry for the inconveeenience.
Hoope tomooorow’s not yer anniversary or annithin’
But if it ees…
Toof crrrap!
Thank ya’ for calling, a Cayltic Seecret.”

Anyway, the breathless laugher seemed to more than make up for the lack of a decent present. It was also a consolation that the wife didn’t have much better luck. Eh… it’s only the sixth anniversary. It’s not like it’s an IMPORTANT number or anything. In the end… despite all that, I managed to dose up with enough cold medicine to instigate some more-than-adequate sofa-sex…. Complete with extensive massage-oil-infused foreplay. Not bad for a guy looped up on Nyquil.

So… that was Friday.

i feel like...

...absolute FUCK. I can honestly say I have never had a worse cold in my life. I slept all of 3 hours last night.

Fuck.

did I say...?

Whoops. The funny thing is my wife and I both made the same mistake. I could have sworn the Friday was the 24th. Check your calendars folks... it ain't!! I was sitting on the couch last night, and I said to my wife... "Ummm... oh... I just realized that tomorrow is not our anniversary".

To which she replied...

"It's not?!"

This is what sleep deprivation does to you folks!

D.

six years...

So, Friday is our anniversary. Hard to get excited. It’s not like we can DO anything or GO anywhere, or hell… even have SEX… what with the baby and all. All it means is that I have to buy a present. And I’ve blanked on ideas, so I’m gonna just hope that our favorite Celtic jewelry store can come through with something nice tomorrow on the way home. It’s not like I’ve forgotten until the last minute… I just knew I was gonna be in the Hamptons tomorrow, so it would be an option.

Got a card and stuff yesterday… gift certificate to the Bath and Body place. After six years, I’ve learned that our taste in “smells” is 180 degrees opposed… no point in BUYING anything from that store... it’ll only go back. Also, after 6 years.. it gets really hard to buy a Hallmark anniversary card that you didn’t already buy some other year!! I almost slipped up.

Anyway, card, jewelry, flowers…

Zzzzzzzzzzz….

How fucking original.

D.

things what suck and don't suck...

I’m sick… cold… flu… something. It took a long time to realize it, cuz my allergies are so bad lately, I couldn’t tell allergy misery from flu-induced misery. But I’m miserable, there’s no doubt about that. So all I have the energy to do lately is read random blogs and complain about how much they suck, while not adding anything to my OWN weblog that would ever convince anyone that mine, in fact, does NOT.

Suck, that is.

I went to the library for a couple of hours today and graded finals and term-papers. Almost done. My grades are due next Tuesday. Not a problem. Still… it sucks that I’m ALWAYS sick at the end of EVERY semester. I don’t think I’ve ever worked on final grades for a course while NOT under the influence of over-the-counter medications.

I guess I never really talked about my trip to Virginia… other than the couple of posts I put up while I was there. It was nice… relaxing… quiet. Our hosts were great… their little kid was cute… my daughter was great with him. (“It’s like I’m a big sister to TWO babies” she said.) I visited my old grad school… it was weird… the smell of the basement was the first thing that was… immediate recognition. It’s creepy how little has changed… it’s been about seven years. The silly signs I taped to my office door are still there. The 20 MB hard drive from my old Mac Plus is still up on a shelf. It was all I could do not to swipe it! I met with my Ph.D. advisor for lunch. Not much to talk about… blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, it was a good trip. The kids even flew well, despite the fact that the trip home was late. I guess sometimes family vacations don’t suck ass, huh?

out-there (meta)physics...

I decided it’s been too long…

A piece of paper is flat. Two-dimensional. Almost. It looks completely flat from far away, but it really has a tiny thickness. It’s really THREE-dimensional. You just have to look really close to tell.

Our universe looks three dimensional. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it has a tiny “thickness” in another dimension… maybe more than one. There are lots of really good reasons to believe our universe might have as many as nine dimensions. (Ten if you count time.)

Just like you can stack up pieces of paper in the third dimension without any of them “touching”… maybe our universe is just one of many in a stack… parallel in another dimension… or several dimensions. Maybe there are lots of “parallel” universes… maybe there are infinitely many. We can’t get to them, but they are there.

If there are really infinitely many universes… really infinite… then everything that could possibly happen DOES happen in one of them.

In one universe there is a version of you that didn’t read this post.

In another universe there is a version of you that WROTE this post.

Of course… these other universes are by definition impossible to know about, so this is the most pointless kind of speculation.

But, still…

D.

more random blogs…

Randommed over to a few more blogs today… came across this guy’s site… his “links” section had banner links to Maxim, FHM, ESPN and the NFL homepage…

Hmmm…. Yeah… remember when I said I only read chicks’ weblogs?

This guy would be the reason why.

Anyway…

So… I don’t want to become one of those really link-heavy blogs, but I have really nothing to say tonight… or rather not the presence of mind to make the effort to say it, so instead I’ll point people to this nice article on Salon.com about “The Matrix: Reloaded”… it sums up a lot of what I had to say about the film with a lot more bigger words than I know.

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2003/05/21/davis/index.html

-- d.

colors... another appeal...

any better?

-- d.

can i just say...?

I just spent about an hour clicking the "random" button on the blog webring links at the bottom of my page, and... fuck, is this world full of boring people or what? Two, maybe three sites worth a second look. The rest... just.... nothing.

Jesus... am *I* that fucking boring?

Kill me.

Oh, and hey... before I forget... one question about MY diary... what color is it? To you, I mean. On the LCD screen of my Mac it looks kinda khaki/tan/light-browny. But on the CRT monitor of a friend's PC the other day it looked green as all fuck. And I hate green. So... dear readers... help out your color-blind friend The Doctor and drop me a note.

-- d.

more matrix...

Now I remember what it was. I read some review where some guy was complaining about the fight scenes. How they look staged... more like a form of modern dance than a fight, and how every move seems to be "reacted-to" beforehand... how punches are blocked before they are thrown. And I thought… this guy is completely Without Clue. First of all, if you’ve ever seen the kind of Hong-Kong style martial arts film that The Matrix is appropriating… this is just how it’s done. It IS a form of modern dance! That’s what makes it appealing. A real fight is just a couple of guys grabbing each other and punching each other in the head… and they always wind up rolling around on the ground… who the fuck wants to watch that? The choreography is PART of the genre… part of the beauty. Dissing a king-fu movie for looking stylized and choreographed is like dissing a Broadway musical because, well, after all… real people don’t sing when they talk! This isn’t like a real conversation at all!!

(ok… I admit… that IS the reason I hate musicals)

So the wire work and the fighting are SUPPOSED to look fake. But the genius of The Matrix is that it gives a REASON for those appearances! In a regular kung-fu movie, it doesn’t make SENSE that people are flying around 10 feet in the air. But in the Matrix it DOES! In a regular king-fu movie it doesn’t make sense that in a “real” fight the people would be blocking punches before they are thrown. But in The Matrix IT DOES make sense!! That’s the real genius of the first film… how it appropriated this Eastern sensibility into this Digital Age tale and blended them so seamlessly. It is so very much of our time… here in the 21st century… we battle machines and it looks like yoga…

Fucking brilliant.

-- d.

bump...

My front license plate is now a tangled scrap of metal dangling from a single screw. I rear-ended someone on the Long Island Expressway this afternoon. They seemed not to notice... or not to care... they just kept driving. It was a tap... I wasn't even sure I made contact until I got home. But, yeah... I need to get a new license plate holder. The car is fine though... gotta love those all-plastic, bouncy Saturns!

The highway was a mess, but the city wasn't as bad as I expected. I've decided that driving in Manhattan is a little like being in "The Matrix"... you just have to believe that the taxis won't hit you, and that the the sea of pedestrians will part every time you make a right turn, and that bike messengers will be magically deflected from your rearview mirrors, and it will be so.

"Are you telling me I can dodge bullets?"

Oh, yeah... I was gonna review the film. I haven't quite digested it yet. I know there were things about it I DID NOT like. Zion was too high-tech... there was a bit too much "look at me!" special-effect-kung-fu-gee-whizzery. All of the new characters were kinda wasted and given minimal screen time. Those albino twins that are featured in all the magazine articles as the Big New Scary Villains... they are in the movie for all of about 9 minutes. Whoopee. But still... I can't say I didn't like it. I think I need to see it again.

I had more to say about it, but it escapes me now...

-- d.

the drive...

Would you believe it takes EXACTLY the same amount of time to get here via car as it does via train/subway/walk?? Why did it seem like an eternity, then?! Actually driving in Queens and Manhattan at 8:00-8:30 was no problem at all… it was getting across the LIE, past the Airport that took forever. Next time I’ll try another route.

Anyway, I have a lot of stuff to do here. First thing I have to do is finish my parking scheme of parking at a meter for an hour then rushing my car to 11th street at 10:30 when the street-sweeping no-parking ban is lifted. Hopefully there aren’t 50 other people trying to do the same thing!!

Maybe I’ll post more later. Now that summer has started, the really long posts will probably become a thing of the past. That sucks… I know. My readership always takes a dive during the summer months. I’ll try to keep up.

D.

day off...

was gonna go in to work today, but didn't.

took the day off... went to see "the matrix: reloaded"...

more on that later...

driving in to manhattan tomorrow. will write a little from the office.


--d.

a moment of quiet...

Our hosts, their kid, my wife, and our kids all went to the library...they left me here so I could rest and shower. Two hours or so until we have to leave for the airport. We won't get home until 11:00 PM or so. It's gonna be a long evening.

I think I've decided to drive into Manhattan tomorrow. It'll be a first. I'm a little freaked. I have to really get in the right mind set.... "dave... you have noplace to be at any particular time... no matter how bad traffic is, you'll get there eventually... relax... breathe... turn up the radio, and enjoy the time alone in your shiny red car." I'm gonna get fucking lost, I just know it!

Anyway... it's been a good trip so far... relaxing, even. Lots of naps. I even have a nice $99 pair of Birkenstocks to show for it. I know, that's an obscenely yuppie thing to do... to spend a hundred fucking dollars on a pair of fucking sandals, but... Jesus... are they comfortable. Really.

d.

quickly...

posting a quick one from the computer at our host's house (33.6 modem... woo-hoo!)

so far the trip has been ok. i'm still pretty tired, though.

big news for the day is that i may treat myself to a real pair of birkenstocks today... rather than the $8.99 target ripoffs Ii usually wear all summer.

anyway... just checking in... i may post sunday nite... monday morning if not.

later, all... -- d.

over…

God. What a day. Non-stop. Write exam. Print exam. Copy exams. Give exam. Write two more exams. Print, copy exams. Go to meeting. Go to lecture. Go to another meeting. Miss 3:30 train. Meeting is ending. Oh no it’s not. Miss 4:04 train. Meeting goes for another 45 minutes. ICQ cranky wife. Run to subway. Just miss #2 express. Pass up #9 local. Wait for next express. Realize that I haven’t eaten all day. Next express is full. Miss 4:20 train. Get on next #9 local train. Local train has problem with doors. First stop. Slam, slam, slam… wait. Second stop… Slam, slam, slam… Slam…. … …. Slam. Get passed by another express train. Look at watch. Miss 4:40 train? Get to Penn Station… train is boarding… grab giant-sized melty Snickers bar. Catch 4:40 train.

*sigh*

I have to stop and get gas when I get to my car too… I’m not gonna get home until after 6:30, and the wife is gonna be pissed. Oh, well… that’s how it goes. You can’t really complain about me being late when I’m about to get 3 months off!

Speaking of which… we have to PACK tonight. Love that. This’ll be our first plane trip with 2 kids too… I can’t even imagine. It’s gonna be a fucking train wreck. Luggage and car seats and strollers… ugh.

Anyway… hopefully you’ll hear from me on Monday and I’ll be all calm and relaxed after my little mini-vacation.

But I wouldn’t count on it!

D.

too much to do…

Last day of the semester for me really… giving a final today, dropping off two more in the office to be given tomorrow… none of them are actually WRITTEN yet… yeah, fuck… I know. Plus I have 2 fucking meetings this afternoon. Way too much. So I have to get on that this morning. Luckily I feel pretty energized. Listening to “Rage Against the Machine” at 7:00 AM will do that to ya.

Tomorrow we leave for Virginia… I won’t even be bringing my laptop with me, so I’ll be out of touch until Monday. The break will probably do me good… I’ve been focusing a little too much mental energy on this site since I put it up. I hope the trip goes well. It’ll be nice to forget about “Stuff” and just hang out for a weekend. And there’s nothing really to DO in Williamsburg… I mean… nothing we haven’t done a hundred times already back when we lived there. So it’ll be a relaxing vacation, not a running-around vacation. Rare.

Back to work Monday… get to the office… gather up stuff for the summer. I’ll probably have to go in to campus a few times anyway, but I want to make sure all my important stuff comes home with me. I’ve been trying to bring home books a little at a time. I have a lot of “copying” to do.

Ok… clearly I have nothing to say right now… so I’m gonna go work on those exams. Wish me luck!! -- D

new and improved...

So, I scrapped that guestbook with the irritating verification step in exchange with one for an irritating name. ("Dreambook"...? Puh-leeze!!) I think I have it all customized the way I want it, although it was a bit of a pain in the arse. Anyway... leave me a note and tell me if you like it better! -- D.

PS... you'll also notice some more sidebar content... links to my daily websites and comix and stuff... added value and all that. I'm looking for a good, free, photoblog/photohosting site to add some pix as well. Anybody know of any?

kids these days…

I handed back some term papers the other day in one of my classes. Now, granted they were about a month old… I confess to that. But listen to this. One of my students didn’t get her paper back, and came to ask me about it. I told her—if you didn’t get it back, I don’t have it. Did you email it or hand it in on paper? Check your email, and I’ll check mine, but I don’t think I got it. I checked my email… both my inbox and my server… I never got it. Later in the day she emailed me her paper, along with this little note…

Dr. M.
I understand it is not your position to track down students work, but when papers are required to be sent via e-mail and they will not be returned until the last class I think you are obligated, unless you think it is each students duty to ask you if their work has been recieved.
I'm sorry to be so frank, but it is exam week and i have more important obligations than dealing with things that should have already been taken care of.

Umm… ok, then. She went on to compliment the class and say how much she enjoyed it, but I was already getting too irritated to pay too much attention to that part. Listen, I make no excuses for the speed with which I’ve handed back papers this semester… it’s sucked. And I don’t mind you being “frank” either, but don’t fucking cop an attitude with me. I don’t give a rat’s ass about your “important obligations”… fuck, I know when you’re 20 you think your final exams are the most important thing in the world… but some day you’ll be thirty-three and have 2 kids and a job… fuck, do you know how much I would give to have my most “important obligation” be a couple of fucking TESTS I have to take? Lighten the fuck up. And learn how to spell “receive” while you’re at it.

Jesus.

In other news, my wife has broken out in some kind of splotchy red rash. It started out last night just where her skin was being “rubbed”… along her bra straps and her waist… but now it’s spread to pretty much everywhere… it’s pretty freaky… she thinks it might be “hives”… stress… she’s going to the Dr. today. The fun never stops at our house!

I’m gonna go write some final exams for my ungrateful students now. Later…

D.


rock me tonight….

I was browsing individual hosts on Kazaa the other night (Actually, “Neo”… the MacOS equivalent) which is a cool way to find music you might want, but you don’t REALIZE you want it, so you’d never specifically SEARCH for it. Anyway, just on a whim I downloaded somebody’s entire collection of Billy Squire mp3’s. And laugh if you will, but the guy really kinda rocked…

You know… in an inoffensive-top-40 kinda way…

Actually, the more I listen to it, the more it sounds kinda like Queen, but with less interesting arrangements. And less personality and charisma. And less talent…

Hmmm… maybe Billy Squire really did suck after all…

I also downloaded some REO Speedwagon. Don’t tell me THEY sucked too?!

D.

getting it out…

… the word, that is… the message…”here I am!”… come and read me… registered with a few more meta sites… weaseled an old OD friend (one of my first readers… Hi Nicole!) into linking me to HER blog… I did the same for her… highly recommended…By the way … anyone notice that I only read smart-funny-chick diaries?

Think that means anything?

That reminds me… I was talking to a friend from the Old School about my courses at the New School, and how I’ve begun to attract a little “Fan Club” of students who are taking my courses every semester. He said, ”Hey… if I was one of these young college girls, *I* would want to take all of your courses… I laughed and assured him that the interest was purely intellectual, to which he replied…

“Is there really any such thing as interest that is “only” intellectual?”

Looking back over my life… yeah… no, there’s not. It’s always good to have a friend with a Ph.D. in Philosophy to lay it down for you like that every once in a while.

Anyway, in the meantime, I’ve noticed that my OD diary still gets hits whenever I post to it, so I’m going to start doing a “daily update” there with a synopsis of my blogspot entry for the day… followed by a link. Nothing that will take too much time…. just a one-liner… Today’s entry is about quantum physics, crying babies, and hot chicks on the train… read today’s entry… Ummm… actually, I could probably just post that same description every day!! Maybe I need to subscribe to one of those “writing prompt” sites. Thing is… that conflicts with my natural dislike of being told what to do.

Fuck it’s hot on this train…

Got all my term papers graded this morning. Made trips to two different university libraries to get a big ass stack of summer reading. In my bag right now… “The Evolution of Physics” by A. Einstein…”Matter and Motion” by James Clerk Maxwell… and “Concepts of Force” by Max Jammer… (who really missed his calling as an old-school rapper)… not to mention a HUGE fucking annotated new retranslation of Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica”. Drroool!

Of course whether or not I get any work done this summer really depends on the whole Oxford thing… which I can’t really spare the brain cells to think about until NEXT week… ugh…

Ok… I promised something “substantial”, but this is just turning in to more rambling. I’m gonna go listen to some AC/DC and read some physics. Rock and roll…

D.

the end is near...

Well, it’ll be one more week before I can finally NOT start every entry here with the sentence…”Oh, I can only write for a little while, cuz I have to do my grading…. Today is the start of Finals Week… I have a few review sessions today and tomorrow… exams Wednesday… I’m leaving on a little trip on Thursday and leaving 2 more exams behind to be “proctored”… next Monday I gather everything up and head off for the summer. I guess there will be one more week in there where I grade finals, but it’s really pretty much the end.

(Which reminds me, I haven’t actually WRITTEN any of my final exams yet! Guess I know what I’m doing on the train ride HOME!)

Anyway, I DO have to work on grading today. I promised my students their various term-papers back. I’ve got to come up with a better ‘method’ for this next year.

*** *** *** ***

This weekend was… oy… I don’t even want to talk about it. No… I mean… really…

*** *** *** ***

I think I may have sprained my pinky playing djembe last Friday. I went in to the Old School for the day to give a lecture, and spent part of the afternoon sitting it with one of the student musical entities. One of these days I’ll learn to play hand drums without injuring myself… there is some kind of technique thing I’m missing there. Week after next I’ll remember to bring a guitar or a bass or something.

Wife and I have tossed around the idea of having a small Memorial Day barbeque… inviting a few couples from the Old School over. Two of the guys are musicians, so that could be fun… a little backyard acoustical jam… haven’t done that in a while.

*** *** *** ***

The thing about Survivor is that it is that, as fake and contrived as it all is, it is SUCH an effective mirror of the “real world”… in that it is True Mediocrity which is rewarded more often than not. But never has it outraged me more than in this season’s finale, in which vapid and lazy “swimsuit model” Jenna managed to stumble her way into victory past Rob… the best player the game has seen since Richard Hatch. My wife and I were mortified when she won… outraged.

I don’t think I want to talk about THAT anymore either…


*** *** *** ***

Ok… that’s a page. I really need to finish these term papers. God, I’ll be glad when this semester is over. I promise a more substantial entry later. Although on what, I have no idea. Any requests??

D.

too much of a good thing…

As if the summer wasn’t full enough of big trips and “vacations”… I got some supposed good news today… my proposal was accepted to give a presentation at a conference at Oxford this summer. Normally that would be a good thing…. Right?

Fuck… I SO do NOT want to do this. Because it means not only spending the whole month of July working on a paper, but it means dragging the whole clan overseas for a week and a half. Too much… I’m actually hoping my University turns down my request for travel funding so I can beg off.

I mean… a good resume builder, but… fuck…

d.

what if no one’s watching…?

I don’t mean to make light of an event like this… and I don’t want to offend anyone whose life may have been directly or indirectly affected by the devastating tornadoes that have been pounding the Midwest… but this really made me think… it really perplexes me…

I was listening to NPR yesterday and there was a story of how folks in some rural TN town are coping with the aftermath of having their main street leveled by a tornado, and they were talking about the church being destroyed. And I just have to think… how… how… HOW can you continue to believe in a omniscient and omnipotent and loving, personal, Fundamentalist, “fall-of-every-sparrow” kind of Christian God when your fucking CHURCH gets hit by a TORNADO??

No matter how long I live, I will never understand it.

The universe is RANDOM, folks… repeat after me. And to the religious types who say, ”Well isn’t it SCARY and DEPRESSING and ISOLATING to believe you live in a universe where everything is random?”… I can only reply… Not as depressing and scary as living in a universe where God sends in fucking tornados to level CHURCHES! How can you believe in that? And not only believe it, but get some kind of metaphysical “comfort” from it as well? It blows my mind.


how hot is TOO hot…?

I was sitting on the sofa last night working on my laptop and noticed a kind of sharp stinging pain under my left thigh… I thought maybe I was sitting on the corner of a book, or a toy, or whatever… given our house it could be anything…and so I reached down to see what it was, and it turns out that the POWER SUPPLY to my iBook was literally BURNING my flesh through my flannel pajamas.

Now, I’m no electrical engineer… but transformers like this aren’t supposed to get TOO HOT TO TOUCH, are they? Fuck… I could have set a mug of water on this thing and made a nice hot cup of tea. I hope there isn’t something wring with it. If my fucking power supply goes up… that makes FIVE hardware problems with this Mac… I swear to fuck, I’m gonna snap.

better like this, or better like this…?

Every day I tweak my “template” here to change the appearance of stuff… mostly the sidebar content. I’ll be adding some more “value” over there soon… website links… maybe some photo links… “What Dave Is Listening To / Reading”… you know… crap like that. Just tweaking…

In the meantime, let me know if anything looks wacky on your particular OS/browser/screen size combination. I’m trying to keep it really, really simple. Also… if you are finding that this “Guestbook” contraption of mine isn’t working, and you can’t leave me notes (I’ve had a couple of complaints) please email me, and I’ll try to find a better solution.

As for now… there are some papers that are really begging to be graded.

d.

itchy, watery eyes…

I always used to scoff at those antihistamine commercials that promised relief for “itchy, watery eyes”. What the hell kind of symptom is that? Itchy eyes? Is that something that someone really needs to be MEDICATED for? Are people really “suffering” from this affliction? I can’t say I’ve ever experienced such a thing.

But now…?

Oh, fuck… do I have The Itchy Eyes.

Fucking allergies.

Anyway, I really don’t have time for writing this morning… not like that EVER stops me, but I asked my students to finish the play we’re reading, and I haven’t finished it myself. Ooops!! You know the year is over when the fucking PROFESSORS aren’t even doing the homework. So I need to finish that up. I also need to write out a final paper assignment for them. It’ll be a short paper, but it needs to be done. It would be really nice if I could hand them back some graded papers today too, but I don’t see that happening.

Last night went pretty well. Went home from work early… took the baby with me to pick up the 4 y.o. from preschool to give the wife a break. Played chess with my daughter for a while when we got home… she has it all down but the long-diagonal-moving pieces… bishops and queens… she just can’t “SEE” that diagonal line yet. We usually just play with one or two kinds of piece at a time, but last night we played with all our pawns, knights, rooks, and our king. The baby sat in his carseat and chewed on the bishops and watched us. (Because, as my daughter pointed out – the queens are big enough for him to chew on too, but “they are too pointy”!) Anyway, I let her queen a pawn and guided her towards a checkmate. It’s so hard! I think it may be harder to figure out a way to LOSE to someone who DOESN’T know how to play chess than it is to figure out a way to BEAT someone who DOES!

I think she’ll have it down by the time she’s 5 if we keep practicing. She can’t really see the best move to make yet… I have to give her hints like, “Uh oh… one of your pieces can take my knight!!” … but she does understand how the pieces move and how they capture. She even understands how one piece can “buh’tect” another one. She’ll say.. “Now I’m buh’tectin’ my queen!” And yesterday I made some paper cutout strips to label the board with A-H and 1-8, so now she knows how to announce her moves in chess notation. “Knight to c5”. It’s too cute. She’s a smart kid.

Then the evening rolled around and my wife an I enacted our plan to get the other little brat to sleep. We’re trying to extend his 9:00 PM nap into a 9:00 PM bedtime. He usually sleeps for a half-hour to an hour, then wakes up and watches TV with us until 11 or 11:30. But last night when he started crying at 9:30, I raced upstairs and picked him up and rocked him back to sleep. No nursing even!! And he stayed asleep until we went to bed.

If that can happen every night, our quality of life will be GREATLY improved. Daughter asleep at 8:00, baby asleep at 9:00… followed by TWO HOURS OF QUIET!

Anyway, it was a much better day than Monday.

Now I need to read a play…

D.

the green grass fades…

As most of my regular readers know, the reason I’m here at Blogspot is that I (like many others) finally got fed up with the amount of downtime over at (free) Open Diary. It seemed like the site was down about 5 days out of every month, and the “notes” function has been broken for about two weeks… it just got to be too much. So here I am, and there are things about this place I like a lot better. I finally got my template looking the way I want it… it’s nice to be able to have a sidebar full of links… other things you couldn’t really do at OD. Plus it’s been super fast and pretty reliable since I’ve been fooling around with it. Until today that is…

Blogger was down this morning.

Fuck.

No matter where you go… there you are.

*** *** *** ***

I feel like undistilled HELL this morning. Baby. Not only did he cry pretty much non-stop from 9:00 – 11:00 PM, but once we got to bed, he still woke up about every hour and a half… all night. And not only do I get to listen to HIM cry every ninety minutes, but I get to listen to my wife have her own little fits simultaneously… and that is really starting to get to me more and more. I hate feeling obliged to dredge up sympathy and support when really I have neither. And I know it’s not ‘ok’ to feel that way, but like I said before… tough shit… call Dr. Phil…

I wonder if my insurance covers antidepressants.

*** *** *** ***

Regular readers will recall a few days ago I posted that entry about my daughter and tornados? Did you hear about all those tornadoes in the Midwest the other day? They killed like 37 people. Shit… you don’t think my daughter is *psychic* do you? That would be just too much to deal with… ”I see dead people… and bad weather”. Or maybe she caused them like Drew Barrymore in “Firestarter” or Halle Barry in “X-men”. That’s all I need… one kid who cries all the time, and another that summons deadly storm systems on a whim.

*** *** *** ***

There was an NPR story this morning about “blogs”… someone in the interview disparaged the name too… I’m glad I’m not alone. Anyway it said that Blogger alone boasts a million users. A million?! And somehow I want people to read THIS one? Hmmm. I need to do some work. And what I was afraid was gonna happen with OD is in fact happening… not all of my 20-or-so readers are bothering to follow me over here. Which means that a lot of people were just reading when the boldface name in the Favorites list reminded them to. Which is fine… expected. I registered at a couple of “meta-sites” yesterday… and one “ring”… I no longer have the guaranteed trickle of traffic that OD assured… so I need to get some links out there. There is one NYC site that indexes Bloggers by their subway stop. Pretty clever. And heaven for stalkers, no doubt. I signed up there, but lied about my exact stop so as to lessen the possibility of my own students stumbling upon my journal!

Anyway… stuff to do. God I’m tired…

D.

open or closed…

The topic of conversation in more than one class lately has been the fate of the universe. In my general physics class, we were talking about general relativity and I went through a derivation based on simple “Physics 101” equations to figure out the “Schwartzchild Radius” of the universe… basically, is the universe massive enough so that, given its size, nothing can escape from it? Which tells us whether the universe will keep expanding forever or of gravity will pull everything back together in the “Big Crunch”. Well… this simple calculation turns out to give about the same results as doing the real complicated derivation… that the universe has only 1% of the mass necessary to “close” the universe. Thus… no crunch…. it just keeps going. And “dark matter” notwithstanding… all these astronomers are now telling us that the expansion of the universe may actually be SPEEDING UP! (They’ve attached the unfortunate term ‘dark energy’ to the force that’s accelerating the expansion. Bleah… sounds a little too “Darth Vadery” doesn’t it??)

In my other class we’re reading Tom Stoppard’s play “Arcadia” and talking about entropy and thermodynamics and the “heat death” suggested by the second law… maximum entropy… equilibrium… the whole universe at the same temperature… cold and dark… the black stars accelerating off into infinity, leaving nothing in the sky to look at… even if there was someone there to look… Not much of a way to run a universe, in my opinion. Like I’m not depressed enough without my cosmology feeding into my natural tendency towards fatalism.

Now, as I told my students… I fucking hate poetry… but I came across this poem by Byron called “Darkness”…

Yeah… it sucks when the poets figure this shit out before the physicists get there. Lord Byron had Lord Kelvin beat by like, 50 years.

I’m still rooting for dark matter. Come on neutrinos… just be a *little* heavier. Pull!! Let’s end this thing the way it started… with a bang…

d.


--- -- --- -- --- -- ---

routine…

How long until the only thing I write about here is no longer the simple fact of being here? Maybe this will fix it… the first real entry here posted in the normal way… written on the train, posted in the office… back to the routine. It’ll be a quick one, though… much work to be done… reading… grading… last week of class… exams and review session next week. It’s about over folks.

Walked out of the house this morning and saw my breath… what the fuck? I do NOT want to be seeing my breath in MAY. There was FROST on my windshield. Not cool. Signs point to a nice day, though… jacket notwithstanding. The allergies are really kicking in… that is SO fucked up… I didn’t have allergies for 30 years, I move to NY, and bang… allergies. I don’t know what kind of killer spores they have up here that we didn’t have in Baltimore… it’s not like I moved to fucking Botswana… it’s 300 damned miles. Anyway, the wife picked up a big box of (generic) Claritin from Sam’s Club… it works somewhat, but it takes a while to kick in… I’m thinking I’ll start taking it at NIGHT so it’s doing it’s job by morning. Sniffle…

Another on the long list of minor irritations… my fave black Skechers are totally fucked… the sole is SPLIT straight across the bottom, right where it flexes when you walk… at the ball of your foot… on BOTH shoes. Damn. I guess 8 months is all you get out of a pair of shoes when you do a lot of brisk city-street walking… still… it seems premature. Sucks to be me.

Nothing much happened this weekend worth noting. Had a hellish trip to Outback last night… kids… I don’t even really remember tasting the food.

Bought a printer for $35 last week for my Mac. It seems nice. Printed out a sample page from the PC, but haven’t connected it to my laptop yet, cuz the stupid thing didn’t come with a USB cable. Grrrrr. And I wasn’t about to spend $20 at Office Max for one… I ordered a 10’ one for half that online… actually, the shipping was twice the price of the cable, but it still came to just over $11. So… now I have my own little printer for “printing emergencies”. I can’t decide if I should leave it at home or bring it in to work. Shit, at $35, I seriously considered buying TWO!

Practiced cutting straight lines with my jigsaw yesterday in preparation for butchering… err… I mean, customizing a piece of unfinished furniture we bought. Scary… taking a power-tool to a perfectly good piece of furniture. I’m not really a “power tool” kinda guy. Perhaps you would have guessed as much? Yeah well… I got this Ph.D. for a reason… so I wouldn’t have to use power tools for a living. Actually I was practicing by cutting up some scrap lumber for another project I’m working on… a 3’x3’ wooden frame that I’m stapling black spandex fabric to, so I can demonstrate the curvature of space in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Yeah…. I know…

I said I was going to do some work today, didn’t I. Mmm-hmmm…

Hey… If anybody knows of any good sites where you can “publicize” your bl…erg… I mean “journal”… let me know. That counter over there that says “12” is really depressing! I was closing in on 6000 over at OD. My average was up also… close to 30 readers a day. I think I’d be really happy with 50… fifty fairly regular readers. I don’t know why it matters, but I’ve said it before… it does. As for my old home at F.O.D… I guess I have to keep it on life support so I can leave notes to friends and login over at O.D… I was going to perform a ritualistic “turning-off-the-lights” over there… changing the color scheme to a black background… but the editor wouldn’t let me edit my preferences… I got an error message.

Oh yeah.,. THAT’S why I’m here, isn’t it?!

Dr. Dave

on the word itself...

"Blog".

It was almost enough to keep me off of this site. I write a journal. Or maybe a diary. But not a "blog." Just the sound of the word... "blah".... "blaaaaah".... "blaaaah-g". Or if you live in New York like me, you may meet with an unfortunate verison that has that kind of almost-two-syllable pronunciation... you know... rhymes with "dog"... "doo-wug".

"Bloo-wug."

Anyway, I hate it and I shan't use the word. You'll find it nowhere but in my URL. Which irks me to no end.

It's Sunday morning. The baby is a sleep. Rare quiet and uncommitted time. No more wasting it doing... this. I'm gonna go toast up an english muffin and read a book for... umm... 7 or 8 minutes until the little brat wakes up.

D.

not quite as good...

So, I decided to get myself one of those free "guestbooks" to serve in place of OD's "notes" here on Blogspot. The link is over on the sidebar on the right there. Leave me a note, we'll see if it works. Sorry about the weird "authorization" step. I'll see if I can find a better one if I stay here for good.

Dave

open for business…

Well, so it works… so what. Now I have to decide what I’m going to DO with it… and I actually have to WRITE something in it. I mean… I can’t do BOTH this place and Open Diary… not with different content anyway… I simply don’t have quite that much to say. I could just use one to mirror the other, but what’s the point? More work for me, and yeah… maybe it means that I’ll have someplace to write when OD is down, but that’s not really worth the trouble of maintaining a whole other site… is it?

Switching over to Blogspot is an attractive option but for one thing… notes. The reason I’m frustrated by OD this week is that the notes are down. I really do like the feedback from readers… just little comments, nothing big… just to know WHO is reading what. And they also act as a reminder to read the journals of others. I don’t see the same inter-connectedness here, the links… the community. I would miss that. And yeah, I guess people could just send me an email, but it’s different…. Isn’t it?

And I think I’ve been on people’s sites at Blogspot that have had the “comments” feature. Haven’t I? I thought… anyway, I don’t see any way to do that. Maybe you have to upgrade to the “plus” service… I dunno. So, that’s my decision I guess… OD with the features I like but which doesn’t work about 5-7 days out of every month… or Blogspot with amazing usability and stability, from what I can tell so far… but missing some of the things that made OD such a special place.

I’m reserving judgement.

But in the meantime, life goes on. Classes were really nice today. Now that the end is nigh, and I’ve given up trying to really do anything coherent it’s just a free-for-all… which of course means we’re having some of the most interesting and productive discussions we’ve had all year… Schrodinger’s cat, wormholes, parallel universes… the real crazy stuff that can make physics so much fun. My Physics-2 class has gone totally to hell… I just kinda walk in and go… “So.. what do you guys want to talk about?”… and they’ll go “String theory!” and I go… “Okay… here goes……..” and talk about string theory for an hour and a half. And it really sucks that it somehow turns out better than the classes I’ve prepared for!

Today is Thursday… the week is over… next week is the last week of classes… finals the following week…

Summer is coming… vacation… and Vacations… May 20th… June… July… August… yeah… being a college prof doesn’t suck.

In other news I find myself being Karmafied left and right… things coming around… going around… I lost my Metrocard for the subway the other day… dammit… it still had about 15 bucks on it. But then today I had bought a single ticket for the train… I didn’t buy a monthly for May, since I’m not going in to work the whole month… just until the 19th… so I bought 2 weeklies and a single ticket for today. Well when I got on the train today I just threw my neck-holder thingy around my neck that holds my (now expired) monthly ticket and the conductors didn’t notice it was expired, so they didn’t ask for my single ticket. Which means I can save it and use it on the 19th. And how much did I save?

About $15. The same amount as was on my lost Metrocard.

The whole universe is just a big zero-sum game, isn’t it?

One more stop for me… it’s the ride home. I was reading free newspapers for the first half of the ride. No more time to write today.

Welcome to my new spot. I’ll try to keep both doors open for a while.

Dr. Dave

Oddly enough, it seems like this Blog, which at first I thought DID NOT work sudeenly magically IS working, even though I've done nothing different. I don't THINK, anyway.

Whatever.

I guess I should start posting here for real. Like I said. I'm straddling. Time to put this foot down.

More soon.

Dr. D.

What is going on here??