fun, fun...
Dave: [...] Yeah, we haven't taken the kids to a movie in a while. We should probably Netflix a few new things for them. I'm just glad they stopped watching "High School Musical" every day.
Mom: What's that?
Dave: Some made-for-TV Disney thing... every child between 7 and 14 is obsessed with it. THe kids go around the house singing the songs all day long.
Mom: Oh... and what's it called again?
Dave: "High School Musical"
Mom: Oh. I thought you were talking about something else. What's that movie with those guys in high school?
Dave: Umm. Dunno...
Mom: Those guys with the leather jackets. They're in a band or something.
Dave: The Ramones?
Mom: Yeah, The Ramones!
Dave: That's "Rock and Roll High School", Mom. Completely different.
Thursday, September 28
grading...
I need to grade some physics HW this morning. I foolishly had both my Astronomy and Philosophy students hand in their monthly homework journal thingies on the SAME DAY, which kind of eliminates the benefit of my brilliant "only collect HW once a month" plan. Anyway, I need to throw a bone to the Physics kids before I tackle this big pile of journals.
Classes continue to go surprisingly well, despite my cold this week. I've been a little rambly what with the heavy doses of medication, and the part of my brain that connects famous science quotes to the scientist responsible for them just completely shut off yesterday. Three times in one class, it occurred to me to reference some famous science quote, none of which I could properly attribute. Oh well... at least I'm not as stoned as this guy.
(Ok... that's half the grading done. Out of 6 papers graded, two have made the assertion that .6 x 2 = .12)
I need to grade some physics HW this morning. I foolishly had both my Astronomy and Philosophy students hand in their monthly homework journal thingies on the SAME DAY, which kind of eliminates the benefit of my brilliant "only collect HW once a month" plan. Anyway, I need to throw a bone to the Physics kids before I tackle this big pile of journals.
Classes continue to go surprisingly well, despite my cold this week. I've been a little rambly what with the heavy doses of medication, and the part of my brain that connects famous science quotes to the scientist responsible for them just completely shut off yesterday. Three times in one class, it occurred to me to reference some famous science quote, none of which I could properly attribute. Oh well... at least I'm not as stoned as this guy.
(Ok... that's half the grading done. Out of 6 papers graded, two have made the assertion that .6 x 2 = .12)
damn blue collar tweakers...
Well, nothing like a refreshing 2 hours of sleep to have you all ready to start your day. The thing is, I'm not even tired. I'm beginning to suspect that I maybe miscounted the number of hours between dosages of meds last night. Christ... if 2 Sudafed keep me up all night when I accelerate the dosage by an hour or so, imagine how bad the stuff is AFTER you make it into crystal meth!
Well, nothing like a refreshing 2 hours of sleep to have you all ready to start your day. The thing is, I'm not even tired. I'm beginning to suspect that I maybe miscounted the number of hours between dosages of meds last night. Christ... if 2 Sudafed keep me up all night when I accelerate the dosage by an hour or so, imagine how bad the stuff is AFTER you make it into crystal meth!
Wednesday, September 27
books and music and stuff...
I'm about 80% of the way through "Chuck Klosterman IV". I'm not very impressed. It's mostly stale music journalism scraped together from 5 year-old magazine articles. Only now near the end are there some essays about other things. And I hate the font, which is a weird complaint about a book, I know, but really... it's bad.
I picked up a copy of John Hodgman's "The Areas of My Expertise" now that it's out in paperback. It's mostly kind of formulaically stupid, but every so often there is a bit of silly brilliance that makes me giggle uncontrollably. It's kind of like Monty Python that way. Every once in a while, the TiVo grabs an episode of Monty Python, and when I watch it I realize that most of it is just kind of dull and pointless. Everyone just remembers the same half-dozen brilliantly silly skits.
(Speaking of sketch comedy - we watched the pilot of "Studio 60" on Monday, and it was just as good the second time. The best part of the show - the repeated invocation of the skit "Peripheral Vision Man". Even though they never actually SHOW the sketch, anyone who has watched several between-heyday seasons of SNL knows exactly what kind of ill-conceived, unfunny, thin-premised skit it WOULD be without ever seeing it. Fucking brilliant.)
I have about 150 pages to go in "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova. Boy, this book has been a chore to get through. It's LONG, and some of the narrative devices are really cumbersome. It's a story told by a women who is recounting some stories being told by her father, which occasionally involve reading long letters written by his mentor in which he describes documents written by Byzantine monks... so you occasionally find yourself nested 4 or 5 narrative levels deep, thinking... "What the fuck am I reading again?" I feel sorry for the editor who had to keep track of all the quotation marks and italics. Anyway, despite all that, it's pretty interesting and I would really like to finish it someday so I can go back and listen to the NPR interview that convinced me to read it in the first place.
I bought the new Indigo Girls album on iTunes, and listened to it once. It seems kinda bland and unmemorable. The only song that stood out was the one with Pink yelling the background vocals. I'll have to force myself to listen to it a few more times this week and give it a chance to escape Forgotten Album Obscurity.
And speaking of forgotten albums, I have to hand it to Apple for the CD-Cover-Browsing feature of iTunes 7. It really is a cool way to riffle through your music collection and be reminded of albums and artists that you've been neglecting. There is just something about the pictures that is different than a text list of album names.
Sigh. Ok. Time for a little rest before the train gets in.
I'm about 80% of the way through "Chuck Klosterman IV". I'm not very impressed. It's mostly stale music journalism scraped together from 5 year-old magazine articles. Only now near the end are there some essays about other things. And I hate the font, which is a weird complaint about a book, I know, but really... it's bad.
I picked up a copy of John Hodgman's "The Areas of My Expertise" now that it's out in paperback. It's mostly kind of formulaically stupid, but every so often there is a bit of silly brilliance that makes me giggle uncontrollably. It's kind of like Monty Python that way. Every once in a while, the TiVo grabs an episode of Monty Python, and when I watch it I realize that most of it is just kind of dull and pointless. Everyone just remembers the same half-dozen brilliantly silly skits.
(Speaking of sketch comedy - we watched the pilot of "Studio 60" on Monday, and it was just as good the second time. The best part of the show - the repeated invocation of the skit "Peripheral Vision Man". Even though they never actually SHOW the sketch, anyone who has watched several between-heyday seasons of SNL knows exactly what kind of ill-conceived, unfunny, thin-premised skit it WOULD be without ever seeing it. Fucking brilliant.)
I have about 150 pages to go in "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova. Boy, this book has been a chore to get through. It's LONG, and some of the narrative devices are really cumbersome. It's a story told by a women who is recounting some stories being told by her father, which occasionally involve reading long letters written by his mentor in which he describes documents written by Byzantine monks... so you occasionally find yourself nested 4 or 5 narrative levels deep, thinking... "What the fuck am I reading again?" I feel sorry for the editor who had to keep track of all the quotation marks and italics. Anyway, despite all that, it's pretty interesting and I would really like to finish it someday so I can go back and listen to the NPR interview that convinced me to read it in the first place.
I bought the new Indigo Girls album on iTunes, and listened to it once. It seems kinda bland and unmemorable. The only song that stood out was the one with Pink yelling the background vocals. I'll have to force myself to listen to it a few more times this week and give it a chance to escape Forgotten Album Obscurity.
And speaking of forgotten albums, I have to hand it to Apple for the CD-Cover-Browsing feature of iTunes 7. It really is a cool way to riffle through your music collection and be reminded of albums and artists that you've been neglecting. There is just something about the pictures that is different than a text list of album names.
Sigh. Ok. Time for a little rest before the train gets in.
jesus christ...
Why the hell is everybody around me on this train reading some kind of fucking God book? News flash people... reading is supposed to expose your brain to NEW IDEAS, not just marinate it in the same fucking pot of "chicken soup" over and over and over again. You people with your closed-up little minds and your Dark Ages mentality really scare the crap out of me.
Why the hell is everybody around me on this train reading some kind of fucking God book? News flash people... reading is supposed to expose your brain to NEW IDEAS, not just marinate it in the same fucking pot of "chicken soup" over and over and over again. You people with your closed-up little minds and your Dark Ages mentality really scare the crap out of me.
Tuesday, September 26
party time...
We have a "welcome back faculty" party-type-thing tonight, and as much as a generally loathe social events of any kind, I had been really kind of looking forward to drinking a lot. But seeing as I'll most likely be kind of woozy and feverish and full of cold medicine, I'm thinking that maybe that's not such a good idea after all.
We have a "welcome back faculty" party-type-thing tonight, and as much as a generally loathe social events of any kind, I had been really kind of looking forward to drinking a lot. But seeing as I'll most likely be kind of woozy and feverish and full of cold medicine, I'm thinking that maybe that's not such a good idea after all.
studio 60...
... is so, so good. Yes, you can argue (as an article on Salon did this week) that when you put Sorkin's wordy intellectual dialogue into an environment that lacks the gravitas of a military courtroom or a White House drama it comes off as more than a little pompous and self-important. Especially when the topic at hand is TV comedy writers. Do they really deserve to be elevated in this way? It's a fair argument, but... y'know what? Don't care. It is so, so good.
It's even better the more you know about the mythology of Sorkin himself, his troubles with the networks and his writing "process". To see the character Matt's office with the sofa and the big empty bulletin board and the countdown-to-air clock reminded me of this old quote from an interview with Sorkin way back in the Sports Night days when the other big TV writer on the scene was David E. Kelley...
So knowing a bit about Sorkin's own "method" makes every scene about not having a script written yet that much funnier.
Also, the writing aside, I'll say right now, I am very likely going to become a HUGE fan of Amanda Peet really, really soon. Yeah. I'm pretty sure.
... is so, so good. Yes, you can argue (as an article on Salon did this week) that when you put Sorkin's wordy intellectual dialogue into an environment that lacks the gravitas of a military courtroom or a White House drama it comes off as more than a little pompous and self-important. Especially when the topic at hand is TV comedy writers. Do they really deserve to be elevated in this way? It's a fair argument, but... y'know what? Don't care. It is so, so good.
It's even better the more you know about the mythology of Sorkin himself, his troubles with the networks and his writing "process". To see the character Matt's office with the sofa and the big empty bulletin board and the countdown-to-air clock reminded me of this old quote from an interview with Sorkin way back in the Sports Night days when the other big TV writer on the scene was David E. Kelley...
Last summer, Sorkin said he spoke with Kelley and learned that Kelley is a Zenlike master of personal discipline. Sorkin recalls, "He said, 'Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I write 'Ally McBeal,' Thursday, Friday, Saturday I write 'The Practice,' Sunday I'm with my wife and kids.' And I thought, I have a real schedule, too. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday I freak out cuz I haven't thought of what next week's show is. Thursday I start yelling at people because I haven't thought of what next week's show is. Friday I go, 'Ohmigod, there's going to be a half hour of dead air on ABC next week,' and then it finally gets done."
So knowing a bit about Sorkin's own "method" makes every scene about not having a script written yet that much funnier.
Also, the writing aside, I'll say right now, I am very likely going to become a HUGE fan of Amanda Peet really, really soon. Yeah. I'm pretty sure.
Monday, September 25
snif...
The thing is, I don't even really have a very bad cold... I don't really feel that bad at all. But when your job is to stand in front of a room and talk for an hour and a half, it doesn't take much to make that experience fairly unpleasant. A little sore throat, a slight headache, a little stuffiness... suddenly teaching a simple class becomes an extreme endurance sport. Add little medicine-head to the mix and you will very likely find yourself confused and babbling in front of a bemused-looking classroom full of students.
So... that was MY day. Meanwhile, the Boy was sicker than me (with a fever) and stayed home from preschool today. Can't wait for the report from the wife when I get home. It's days like this that you can be happy when your cellphone battery dies.
The thing is, I don't even really have a very bad cold... I don't really feel that bad at all. But when your job is to stand in front of a room and talk for an hour and a half, it doesn't take much to make that experience fairly unpleasant. A little sore throat, a slight headache, a little stuffiness... suddenly teaching a simple class becomes an extreme endurance sport. Add little medicine-head to the mix and you will very likely find yourself confused and babbling in front of a bemused-looking classroom full of students.
So... that was MY day. Meanwhile, the Boy was sicker than me (with a fever) and stayed home from preschool today. Can't wait for the report from the wife when I get home. It's days like this that you can be happy when your cellphone battery dies.
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