Kablammo!

Again, none of these seemed to justify an individual post:

• As much as I’m opposed to the “Economic Stimulus Payments” as a policy decision—which is severely—I will confess that I’m giddy with the anticipation of getting my $600 check. I know full well that it’s not free money, and in fact I think Americans are actually undertaxed. But I already have my heart set on buying something to stimulate the economy. (I’ll be the German economy I’m stimulating, but at least that’s better than stimulating the Chinese economy, right?) And so it is that I’m somewhat miffed to learn that it will be weeks before I see a dime.
• At 3:30 A.M. today, I was awoken by the pungent smell of cabbage. I gleefully went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water, then tasted the concoction I’d left cooking in the Crock-Pot™ brand slow cooker. It was absolutely delicious. Being an idiot, I then went back to bed, leaving the Crock-Pot™ plugged in and turned on. By morning the concoction had become a disgusting, inedible mess. I’ll chalk this one up as a learning experience, and I’ll try to remember to pick up another jar of sauerkraut on my way home so I can try again.
• So it turns out that my favorite cafeteria cashier lady is Ethiopian. I’m going to look up how to say “Thank you” in Amharic.

I thought that carton of ice cream looked a bit different from how I remembered. Take a look at this picture (new carton on top, old one on the bottom):

I’m disappointed in you, Breyer’s. You used to have integrity.

Song of the Moment: «Fratres (for 12 cellos)» — Arvo Pärt

There must be a bird’s nest on the window-ledge of my apartment. It’s the only explanation I can come up with for the remarkably loud pre-dawn cheeping this morning. Unfortunately, the most likely place for a nest would be a corner of the building that would be pretty hard for me to get a look at from inside. I’ll have to try taking the screen out of one of my windows or something, because it would be pretty rad to get a nice photograph of some baby birds. Especially if they’re going to keep waking me up at 6 in the morning.

In other news, I remain unaddicted to WoW. Take that.

• On the minus side, they were out of Haribo Goldbären when I had a hankering for gummi bears, so I had to settle for some Happy Cola instead.
• On the plus side, there was a stray bear in the bag of cola bottles! Hooray for assembly-line screwups.
• On the minus side, Olsson’s was all out of Boulez and Stockhausen recordings yesterday, when I was eager to buy some at Maurizio Pollini’s recommendation.
• On the plus side, I got my hands on some fine Chopin works I’d been meaning to buy—and it just so happened that the Ben & Jerry’s across the street from Olsson’s was handing out ice cream cones for free.
• On the minus side, I am getting an officemate soon, so my time alone in this room is coming to an end.
• On the plus side, I moved some stuff around and snagged an extra bookcase that was lying around, so now I’m basically walled off in a little cave.

There’s probably a grain of truth to this:

Lest the value of computer searching be unduly emphasized, I would like to point out that computers have definitely not obsoleted human patent examiners. Computers cannot be made to combine references to anticipate specific inventions, although this would not appear to be insuperable. At the present time, there is no adequate approach towards the searching of mechanical inventions. I think it is self-evident that the searching of the chemical arts is a relatively easy matter compared to the searching of drawings. The underlying skeletal nature of chemical inventions, and their classification into well-recognized groupings render their searching a relatively simple matter. This is not true of mechanical inventions and in particular, complex mechanisms.

Arthur H. Seidel, Antitrust, Patent and Copyright Law Implications of Computer Technology, 44 J. Pat. Off. Soc’y 116, 123 (1962)

Then again, I don’t know much about chemistry [1], so I can’t really be sure.

In other news, sometimes it happens that I get a song stuck in my head without knowing what song it is [2]. Sometimes I’ll remember a snatch of the lyrics [3], or I’ll have some idea who the recording artist might have been [4], but just as often I won’t. The song I most recently got stuck in my head sounded like it might have been a post-Sgt.-Pepper Beatles track [5], or maybe a John Lennon solo track. Turns out it wasn’t. After weeks of increasingly halfhearted searching, I gave up. Some time later I put my mp3 player on shuffle and it spit out “I Could Spend the Day” by The Zombies, which is what I’d been looking for all along. I was happy.

* * *

[1] I may not know much about chemistry, but I do know some biology, I have a few science books, and I even remember some of the French I took.

[2] As I understand it, Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday” by getting it stuck in his head without knowing what it was. After months and months of trying to figure out where he might have heard it or who might have recorded it, he grudgingly accepted the fact that he might have come up with it himself. So far, I haven’t been as lucky.

[3] Remembering a snatch of lyrics can be helpful, especially when what you remember also happens to be the name of the song. Unfortunately that doesn’t help all that much when what you remember is “I Do”. For the record, it’s by The Marvelows. It took quite a lot of searching for me to find it.

[4] Knowing the band isn’t very helpful when you have a dozen of that band’s albums. I mean, obviously it’s helpful since it narrows it down to a dozen albums, rather than a few hundred, but that’s still an awful lot of songs to dig through searching for a single riff that you almost thought was David Bowie at first before you suddenly realized it was CMX. (For the record, it was “Punainen nro. 6″.)

[5] Look, I do know the White Album, but my knowledge of anything past that is sketchy at best. (For the record, I think their strongest work was Rubber Soul or Revolver.) If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been meaning to familiarize myself with Abbey Road and Let It Be.

I’ve never cared in the least about the NCAA tournament, and I’ve never followed college basketball. (I attended a few Princeton games years ago, but that’s mostly just because my dad is a huge fan of Pete Carril’s system.) So I wouldn’t have entered the office NCAA pool, except that my boss basically insisted on it.

Then UConn went and lost in the first round and blew everything to hell. Thanks a lot, Huskies.

Song of the Moment: «The Chokin’ Kind» — Joe Simon

Which of these things is not like the others?

n	ñ
n	N

• I have acquired a newfound appreciation for, and understanding of, that one scene from that one Naked Gun movie and that one scene from that one Seinfeld episode.
• What’s been stuck in my head recently is a mash-up or juxtaposition of “I Do” by the Marvelows with “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves. The combination as I’m imagining it doesn’t quite sound fantastic, but it does at least sound coherent, and the parts of the two songs do seem to complement each other pretty well. This is more than can be said for my ill-fated mash-up of Coldplay’s “The Scientist” and Radiohead’s “High & Dry” a few years back, which nearly got me stabbed by a group of my friends.
• I’ll be attending a hearing in Federal court on Friday. Later, I should be getting my cookie supply replenished. I am looking forward to both.
• My mp3 player (well, one of them at least) smells like spices.

• One could probably instigate a riot, or at least a good deal of vitriolic complaint, by playing Bob & Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle” at a party or dance. (You’d know why if you heard it, or even looked it up on Wikipedia.) I’m sorely tempted to do so. (It’s a good thing nobody reads this blog.)
• There sure were a lot of songs whose names fit the pattern of “$verb1, $verb2 and $verb3” back in the early days of rock and roll. F’rexample:
  • Shake, Rattle & Roll
  • Jump, Jive an’ Wail
  • Flip Flop and Fly
  • Jumps, Giggles and Shouts
• Though I am not a cynic by nature [this will be the substance of a future post], I had an extremely cynical and eminently plausible realization today. For the past several months, I have been busy putting off applying to law school. Deadlines are beginning to breathe down my neck. It’s sheer idiocy to have waited so long, especially considering it’s rolling admissions everywhere, so my chances of getting in are decreasing steadily and monotonically, and have been for quite some time. I keep getting letters and emails from various law schools, offering to waive my application fee, ostensibly because I did OK on the LSAT and as an undergrad, but more importantly because I ticked a box saying “Go ahead, send me crap.” So today it occurred to me that the real reason for waiving people’s admission fees is much more straightforward, and quite cynical: US News rankings. Convincing more people to apply to your school, particularly near the end of the application window, when their chances are lower anyway, means you get to reject more applicants and thereby look more selective and give your US News stats a subtle boost.
• Speaking of which, it’s going to be a Laugh Riot when I procrastinate this so effectively that I don’t even get my act together in time to take advantage of all those offers.

• White Russian milkshakes are the best thing ever. Especially when they’re made with [redacted], which I suppose would make the drink some kind of “beige” or “taupe” Russian.
• Chai, on the other hand, is gross.
• Bubble tea, on the gripping hand, is merely OK. The tapioca ‘pearls’ can be a bit much.
• You have to eat the fortune cookie if you want the fortune to apply. Does anybody seriously dispute that?
• There was a story in last week’s Washington Post magazine about a woman who had a shoelace break. She decided to replace the shoelace instead of throwing the shoes in the garbage, and that decision was apparently worth writing a page-long story about. Is that what American consumer culture has become? Is it that noteworthy when somebody puts forth minimal effort to repair something rather than discarding it and buying a new one? For fuck’s sake.
• This whole ’subprime’ fiasco, which would more accurately (in my decidedly non-expert opinion) be considered a ‘collateralized debt’ fiasco, reminds me of the following joke:
  

  Q. What do you get when you stir a spoonful of shit into a gallon of ice cream?
  A. A gallon of shit.

  (Apparently a lot of expert financiers thought the answer was “AAA-rated bonds”.)

• This whole ’subprime’ fiasco also reminds me of the lesson I learned from the S&L fiasco of the 80s, which I was far too young to understand at the time but read all about in Inside Job (which I highly recommend); a lesson that was reinforced by the Enron fiasco some years back. That lesson, of course, is that novel accounting practices are Bad News. Obviously that’s an oversimplification, but should you really be able to treat hypothetical money you might get in the future as a current asset? It’s like that other joke: If you owe the bank $100K, you’re in trouble. But if you owe the bank $100M, the bank is in trouble.

Songs of the Moment: «Nouveau Western» — MC Solaar; «Bonnie & Clyde» — Serge Gainsbourg

People I know:

• Bruce Greenspan
• Butterflynn
• Critical
• EstonianPunkCat
• Fire_Hazard
• Hille
• Manganese
• PBones
• Scarlett1304
• Spine Porridge
• Supachump
• SushiDeJaneiro
• Tomahagne
• Vaarikaisand
• WordToKyle
• Zepsub
• Zot

Things I read:

• badscience
• BillMon
• CommonDreams
• DailyKos
• Dan’s Data
• ebalogaalne
• Hullabaloo
• I, Cringely
• In These Times
• Ironic Sans
• Language Log
• Literal-Minded
• MediaMatters
• Paul Graham
• Salon
• Slacktivist
• The Economist
• The Gadflyer
• The Grauniad
• The Nation
• The Onion
• The Register
• The Superest
• Unclaimed Territory
• Wikipedia