2/10/2008


The new kitchen is always the topic around our house: yesterday's topic was why does a stone floor feel colder than a wood floor when either one is going to be the same temperature as the rest of the house-- and I found the answer on-line; it is because stone is more dense and thus a better conductor of heat or cold and since the floor will generally be cooler than 98.7, it's going to make you feel colder (which leads one to wonder how cold Viggo Mortensen was during the filming of the naked knife fight in Eastern Promises-- he spends a lot of time crawling around on a stone floor.)

2/8/2008

I learned two things last night: God is a giant ear, and a "hook-up" is when you smuggle prison food out of the dining hall and back to your room, where you then try to make it a serviceable meal with whatever other materials you have on hand (for example, you take noodle soup and pour it into a bag of crushed cheese puffs and then put it under your pillow for ten minutes-- it congeals into a jail-house "burrito").

2/8/2008


Alex approached me with another "drawing" of his and I got ready to channel my time spent in the Uffizi (I use the Stanislavski method when I pretend that the scribbles my children produce are actually representative of something) but the person he drew had two arms, two legs, a face, two eyes and a mouth!

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=irule

Emu Farm

A new song by Greasetruck, but it's the same old story: boy meets girl, boy tries to impress girl by purchasing an emu farm, boy neglects security at said farm, emus escape, chaos ensues, stray emu kicks boy's girlfriend in the shin, and boy leaves town (I recorded the song on a Zoom Mrs-8, a tiny portable digital recorder and stuck the audio over a couple of random Youtube videos with some free Windows MovieMaker software).

Fourteen Words That Will Kill Your Buzz


I was having fun writing my trilogy of aphorisms about time, until I read this last night in Nabokov's Speak, Memory: "our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

2/5/2008


Living in the present is an impossible dream: one part of the mind is always anticipating the future, while another constantly assesses the past.

2/4/2008

Thinking about the past is a trap: remembering the bad times is depressing, and reminiscing about the good times is depressing as well, because inevitably, things have changed.

2/3/2008

Alex's swim lesson will be ten minutes longer today, to make up for the time that was lost last week because some kid upchucked in the pool.

2/2/2008

On Google Trends you can observe the top 100 web searches for the day-- it's a window to the consciousness of the world; on the day Heath Ledger died his name was the top search-- and number two was "Keith Ledger."

2/1/2008

Writing my sentence while I have to urinate ensures that it will be short.

Homeless Elbow

Two days ago in Boulder, my friend Ryan and his wife Cat were attacked by a homeless man with a club-- Ryan took a shot to the head before Cat wrested the club from the attacker and beat him with it-- she reported in the paper that her arm was sore from bludgeoning the itinerant . . . seriously!

Finned and Defused

I'm reading Marvin Minsky's The Society of the Mind (his treatise on intelligence, artificial and otherwise) and Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body at the same time: I don't know whether I'm a very complicated robot or a very hairy shark.

It's Hard to Start Hamlet With A Hangover

If you have plans for the Super Bowl, make sure they're flexible-- because I sent an e-mail to the President of the Fox Network asking him to move the game to Saturday evening (I'm starting Hamlet on Monday and I don't want either myself or my students to be tired from watching the game).

I'm Above This Kind of Gossip

Apparently, the story that Mark Hamill got into a car accident and had reconstuctive surgery on his face between filming The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi is an urban legend . . . not that I care or anything . . . but his face does look kind of different . . . but what do I care?

How Much Does a Coffee Filter Filter?

This morning I spilled the entire canister of coffee beans onto the kitchen floor (which isn't terribly clean, Alex and Ian are slobs) , but I swept up the scattered beans and salvaged them; a coffee filter strains out dirt and old food, right?

The Hassler

Eighteen consecutive missed pool shots (including a break that flew off the table and into the wall) are erased by one lucky jump shot.

Dave Rationalizes Violence in the Office

I'm starting to feel less guilty about punching Brady in the leg yesterday-- in fact, because of his history of madcap pranks, I'm starting to think that maybe he even deserved to get punched in the leg-- as just desserts for past mischief . . . despite his innocence in this particular shenanigan.

I Punch a Colleague For No Good Reason

Unfortunately, the title of this post is accurate, but there were donuts involved so I think you'll understand how it happened and empathize with me . . . I walked into the English office yesterday, ravenous, and I saw a full box of donuts on the table-- so I grabbed a Boston Creme and pulled up a chair-- pulled the chair right up to the table, in front of the box of donuts, as I wasn't planning on eating just one donut . . . I planned on sitting down and eating several donuts-- and the office was crowded so I wanted to be as near as possible to the donuts-- and then I went to sit down on my chair-- the chair I had just pulled up to the table-- but there was no chair . . . I had sat down on air-- the chair was gone-- and as I was falling I looked over my shoulder and saw my friend and colleague Kevin laughing hysterically and in that split second I decided that he had pulled the chair away (if you knew him, you'd know that kind of prank would be right up his alley) and instead of breaking my fall with my hand, I lunged and punched him in the leg-- hard-- and then I hit the ground; Kevin said, "Why'd you hit me?" and most people in the office were appalled by the violence, but my friend Eric approved-- because pulling a chair out from someone as they sit down to eat a donut is not only low-class but also dangerous . . . but as it turns out, he didn't pull the chair away-- the chair was never there in the first place-- in my excitement to eat the donut, I thought I pulled a chair up to the table but, apparently, I didn't . . . so Kevin was laughing hysterically because he had never seen a grown man sit on a non-existent chair, not because he had pulled it away, and so not only did I fall awkwardly in front of eight colleagues, but I also punched one of them in the leg for no good reason.

I'm Not Superstitious Anyway

If the Giants lose, I'll shoulder the blame (I was growing a Giants good-luck victory beard, but it got really itchy so I shaved it.)

To Drool or Not to Drool

I have to stop bringing such good sandwiches to work (e.g. ham, mozzarella, fried peppers, onion, lettuce, and balsamic dressing-- Catherine made me one yesterday and I replicated it today) because it's all I think while I'm teaching my morning classes, and when I think about food I salivate profusely, and salivating profusely is no way to teach literature.
A New Sentence Every Day, Hand Crafted from the Finest Corinthian Leather.