And I feel fine

DID YOU KNOW? Prior to Russian spelling reform, a single letter which was necessarily appended to the end of nearly all words ending in consonants accounted for 3.5% of all Russian written text.

We're singing Benjamin Britten's War Requiem in University Chorus this semester and I have possibly never been as excited about any concert I have ever performed in. Britten juxtaposes the traditional requiem text with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, who served in World War I and wrote poetry about trench warfare and then died one week before fighting ended in 1918. He's got cred, Wilfred Owen.

So, yeah, there's a lot of trading off between the choir singing in Latin and the tenor and bass soloists singing in English about passing bells for those who die as cattle and everything. It all culminates in the extraordinary Agnus Dei, when the choir is singing about the "lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the Earth" and the tenor is just hovering over that with "One ever hangs where shelled roads part."

It's even better than Viva La Vida.

Today we were practicing the Dies Irae, and our director was talking about how most other composers like to set the day of judgment text as all screamy, like "DIES IRAE DIES ILLA QUA RESURGET EX FAVILLA!" but Britten starts it off really quiet and pulsating, and only gets loud when he's talking about the trumpet's wondrous sound. Why is that? We decided that it's because you're not ready for the judgment day. It could come anytime. So while Verdi's got his sopranos that are like, "Oh no, it's the judgment day!", Britten is like, "Great, it's the judgment day, and I wasn't ready."

It got me to thinking, because just earlier today over e-mail we were talking about World War Z, which I've never read but apparently Ben thinks that some recently-hacked road signs portend the zombie apocalypse. It got me thinking, you know, in all those zombie movies, nobody ever expects the zombie apocalypse. It just kind of happens in some small town/government research facility when you least expect it.

It's kind of like the judgment day as envisioned by Benjamin Britten.

So I have decided that my new goal in life is to compose a Zombie Requiem. It will juxtapose the traditional requiem text with quotations from Night of the Living Dead and 28 Days Later, and also the song "Zombie" by The Cranberries. I think this means that not only will I be prepared for the zombie apocalypse, I'll be prepared for its inevitable conclusion. Just as Britten's War Requiem was premiered for the reconstructed Coventry Cathedral in England, so will mine be premiered at the newly-reconstructed White House or something.

This is the best idea I have ever had.

Memory summons

DID YOU KNOW? The platypus appears on the Australian 20 cent coin.

It's weird because I was just talking about sex ed the day before yesterday and I was just thinking about this girl who claimed that your uterus could fall out of your body if you were wearing tight jeans, and how Mr. Frantz was like, "No, I am a professional, and I don't think that is possible." I could not remember her name for the longest time when I was telling this story and I went to bed last night still not remembering it and now this morning facebook informs me that it is her birthday. Oh, what a world we live in.

I just felt like I needed to post something today. I am kind of blerg right now because the prep I've been working on this morning did not work and now it might screw up my Taco Tuesday plans. I started a different blog entry this morning but did not finish it. The gist of it was that my favorite part of any X-Men movie is when Cyclops dies. I think I'm going to take comfort in that. Bite me, James Marsden.

For no one

DID YOU KNOW? Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated during the recording sessions for "Sympathy for the Devil," necessitating a lyric change from "who killed Kennedy?" to "who killed the Kennedys?"

The other day I got this e-mail:

hey i am taking a long long road trip alone.

if you sent me a mix cd i would listen to it a lot. maybe an overly definitive amount. so. if you decide to make one, and send it before i leave (leaving On The Road (in a car) date approx. feb 4) that would be great. you could also send it after and then i would just have it after, when i'm living in my parents house and kicking my feet around my hometown.

address for such possibilities:

And then she leaves her address and her phone number. The really fun thing is that I don't know this girl. She knows some other Sam Maurer who graduated from Mass Academy in 2002, I believe, and went to U Mass Amherst. We have really similar e-mail addresses, and mine is kind of the default e-mail address for someone named Sam Maurer, so I can see why she gets confused sometimes and sends her reuniting e-mails to me.

I am really excited now. I am deciding what songs to put on. I love driving playlists. They are different from regular playlists. Here is what I have so far:

"Electric Feel" -- MGMT
"Michael" -- Franz Ferdinand
"Reckoner Lockdown" -- Kanye West vs Radiohead
"I Want It All" -- Queen
"Piazza, New York Catcher" -- Belle + Sebastian
"Brainwashed" -- Kinks

Do you have any suggestions for a driving playlist for someone you've never met who will be receiving it under false pretenses?

It is real, it is Rael

DID YOU KNOW? Jerry Springer's security guard, Steve, has his own talk show.

I forget why, but at some point I signed up for Lufthansa's "Generation Fly" e-mail program, which hooks youths up with discount flight fares. I think you had to give them some information so that I could get access to their special site that has student fares. I went to a lot of trouble signing up and then they gave me the secret code to get into the website, which was like the username "STUDENT" with the password "FLY." Good job, Lufthansa.

So today I got an e-mail advertising "Spring break in Europe from $184*." Well. That must be kind of a big asterisk, there. So I headed over to the Generation Fly website as STUDENT FLY to see that was about. It turns out that $184 refers to one possible one-way fare from New York to London. So, yes, it is technically possible to have a spring break in a European city for $184. I guess it costs more than that if you want to return to the United States after your spring break, but hey, Lufthansa did not make any promises about "Spring break in Europe AND RETURN from $184," now did they?

In other news, tomorrow is our annual Radke lab ski trip and I am pretty excited. Sam's Mom warned me to be careful because there are REAL MOUNTAINS in California. This is also what she said about skiing in Boston, so I guess the mountains I'll be seeing tomorrow will be incredibly, extraordinarily real. I'm down with that. Freedom tastes of reality.

Lovely brunch of coconuts

DID YOU KNOW? Vegans who eat honey sometimes call themselves bee-gans. It's official, I think.

I love East Bay Express. Mostly I love the restaurant reviews. They are hilarious. I have never heard food referred to as "unctuous" and "snarky" as much as I have in the East Bay Express. Seriously, what does that mean?

If you dutifully make your way to an East Bay Express news kiosk every weekend and immediately open to the restaurant review page, you would realize some things. First of all, there is so clearly a form that East Bay Express restaurant reviewers fill out. It's like, you go in, you describe the decor, you describe the appetizers as "unctuous" or "snarky," then you talk about one that you didn't like. TRANSITION. "Better were the entrees, which comprised...". At the end, the second-to-last paragraph is always, and I mean always, a description of the vegetarian options. It's beautiful.

But I'm serious--I actually like East Bay Express a lot and I would really be sad if it met its demise as most forms of print media are seeming to do right now. Thankfully, as long as there are people growing marijuana in the East Bay, there will always be plenty of people to buy advertisements in East Bay Express, so I'm guessing that their business model is pretty much recession proof.

Anyway, sometimes they have also have really excellent articles. A few weeks ago, there was one about the world's thinnest condoms. It's a really great read. I'd encourage you to read the whole thing. They talk about everything, even about how changing attitudes towards sex and sex education have shaped the condom market.

This week they had an article about Thai brunch. Thai brunch is this temple in South Berkeley. Basically, you go and you "make a donation" to the temple. You receive one specially-cast Thai brunch token for every dollar you donate. Then you go and stand in line for like, half an hour because five hundred other people came to do this. The vegetarian line is four times longer than the meat line. When you get up to the front of the endless, endless line, you exchange your tokens for food by putting them in a collection bin, because it would be not-Buddhist for the people dispensing your food to handle your currency. The food is pretty good. Their spicy green beans with tofu are beyond compare, and their mango sticky rice is also nice. Then since the weather is never below fifty degrees you sit outside and eat your food. You can even sit on the grass in front of the public library and a poster of LL Cool J.

Recently I haven't been going very much because there are seriously like eight thousand people there, and it's all hipsters who have no intention of actually getting food, they just want to kind of walk around and talk about the beautiful zucchinis they bought at Whole Foods and take up space. I just have this thing about standing in line with people who are less passionate about the service than I am. I think I should get to be ahead of them. Idonno. It's not you, it's me.

But as East Bay Express details in this article, there are some other people who have non-hipster-based objections to Thai Brunch. Namely, they object to the fact that Thai Brunch is supposed to be some sort of church fundraiser thing, but actually it's a restaurant that serves 600 people in four hours every Sunday outside. They say that you put in a "suggested donation" to get your tokens, but I don't think you can actually get tokens without food. And anyway, the whole hand-wavy token system frees them from health codes and taxes. The anti-Thai Brunch people make a bunch of good points, like, "Hmm, maybe if you want to have a Thai restaurant, you should zone for it and actually build one."

Maybe I am just frustrated by lazy hipsters who prevent me from getting Thai food, but I am generally inclined to agree with this argument. Anyway, here are the two most hilarious quotes from the article:

But many temple supporters live far enough away from 1911 Russell Street that they never experience the drawbacks of Sunday breakfast, and have little grasp of what the neighbors are fussing about. "I drive from Point Richmond every Sunday," said Tony Carr, a longtime breakfast-goer who owns Vikram Yoga studio in Oakland. "They have a noodle soup that you can't find anywhere." Carr added that in his observation, most of the houses on Oregon Street have driveways, so he can't understand why they would object to people parking on the street. "I understand there's some problems with the neighbors, but didn't they know about it before they moved in?"

Okay, seriously, just imagine a yoga instructor being interviewed for this article and saying, "They have a noodle soup that you can't find anywhere." How Berkeley can you be?

A February 12 hearing at Berkeley's zoning adjustments board will decide the ultimate fate of Wat Mongkolratanaram's Sunday breakfast, and at this point, said Jennings, the board appears to be split on its decision. "We're trying to be professional reasonable human beings, but the problem is these people have not budged," she said. "I think they're gonna bluff us off again till the 12th, at which point the board is going to bluff on their project." Jennings admits she's a pessimist, but said she finds the board's ambivalence disheartening. "How can they be split on something that's illegal?" she asked, then answered her own question. "It's Berkeley, hello."

Yeah, that's about right.

Apple dapples

DID YOU KNOW? At a recent charity event in Washington DC, Alice Waters saved a cookbook author's life by telling Tom Collichio to perform the heimlich maneuver on her.

Nice things that happened today...

1) I made apple butter and forgot how lovely that makes your entire life smell. I guess it's good I did it when Ruth wasn't home; filling the house with such odors around an anosmic would be basically criminal.
2) I gave Sam's Mom a call.
3) I went for a run for about 5 miles.
4) I found a coffee table for $10 on craigslist.
5) I convinced Colin to help me pick up this coffee table.
6) As a reward, I gave him the leftovers of the 92,000-calorie banana bread I made on an impulse last night, which I would have probably otherwise finished tonight.

Jigsaw falling into place. In other news, I got into Russian this term and haven't decided whether to take it yet. Oh, I don't know. Pyoo pyoo. I'm going to bed early.

Fearful symmetry

DID YOU KNOW? Certain medications can induce blue urine.

For some reason this afternoon I was thinking about Romantic poetry that I wrote in high school. I was always kind of obsessed with how extraordinarily bad the poetry of American Romantic poets was. Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier. The three-named ones. They're the worst. I think this is because I secretly have always wanted to be Walt Whitman.

So when I was asked to write Romantic poetry, I always kind of used them as a template and set about writing bad parodies. My 11th grade work was entitled "Ode to a Ruffed Grouse" and earned the following accolade from Mr. Rosenthal: "Poem almost succeeds!" Oh, Mr. Rosenthal and his faint praise. I don't know, I thought it was a pretty good depiction of the state bird of Pennsylvania (state drink = milk, state flower = mountain laurel, go quiz bowl). All I remember is that there were four or five stanzas and each one ended with the refrain,

Ruffed as thy rough rugged neck,
Ruffed as thy brunneous neck.

I also remember that Mr. Rosenthal did not believe that the word "brunneous" existed and I explained to him that I heard it during the 2001 National Spelling Bee, because I watched the spelling bee every year after my embarrassing choked-out misspelling of "equilvent" in the third round of states.

My poem senior year for AP English was not nearly so accomplished, and I remember that Mrs. O'Brien gave it a lower grade until she read my included "analysis" of the poem and evaluated it in the context of Longfellow et al. The poem was about a lake, which I figured was a great metaphor for nature, poetry, mirrors, oh, just everything. Taking a page from Keats's excellent "To Autumn," which uses "s" "f" and "m" sounds to suggest the mist, blossoming, and laziness of the season, I tried to pick consonants that were generally evocative of lakes for my opening line. I came up with:

HOW QUICKLY! lilt thy rippled swells.

And dang, I was really proud of that, and also the sixth line which rhymed it with,

And stirring clouds of cockleshells.

...which Mrs. O'Brien found to be a hilarious image for some reason. You know, there's a lot of cockleshells, and they're kicked up in clouds by the lilting swells. My poem had an abccba rhyme scheme to suggest waves disturbing a lake. God, I was amazing. In the third stanza I even slant rhymed "eye" with "symmetry" as a homage to Blake's "The Tyger."

And that brings me to the point of this post, which was this blog entry, where some dude asks, "If you could change one line in the canon of all English language poetry, what would it be?" He is really smart and references tons of obscure stuff. But, yo, you know what has always bothered me?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

It's such a freaking letdown to be talking about lambs here. God, William Blake, I know you were all church-y and stuff, but for reals, this is a poem about a Tyger, not Jysus. It's a total letdown after stanzas of "On what wings dare he aspire!" and "When the stars threw down their spears" and my personal favorite, "What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?" I almost want to start using that as my new expletive. "What the hammer?"

I will tell people it's 90's nostalgia.

I only want to say

DID YOU KNOW? Mark Zuckerberg once printed business cards that said, "I'm the CEO... Bitch."

Ann Coulter sure had a good day yesterday. By that, I mean that since her stated life goal is to go on TV and get people to yell at her in order to generate publicity for herself, she was very successful at doing that. Oh, look at me right now, here I am, talking about her twice in two days on my blog. Pyoo pyoo pyoo pyoo!

So she went on The View yesterday and, uh, then there was a ten-minute stretch of nonstop yelling. Uh, don't watch this.



People want to say that Ann Coulter lost and got smacked down or whatever, but, you know, it was basically just yelling, and The View had like five times as many people to yell with, and nobody really made that much sense. Also, The View was talking about Ann Coulter behind her back and that was not cool. On the other hand, Ann Coulter does invoke Hitler near the end, and it's tempting to say that she therefore loses the debate because of Godwin's Law, but, you know, usually when you're talking about Godwin's Law, it's because somebody compared her opponents to Nazis, not herself. Anyway, I think it's safe to say that there are no winners.

But Ann Coulter's thesis is that single mothers will precipitate the destruction of human civilization, and she somehow conflates that with liberalism, and somewhere in all the yelling she says, "And the mothers! They're always whining! Hollywood and everything is all about stories of single mothers and how brave they are and nobody is ever like, 'Oh there's a single man raising a child and isn't he great?'"

And if I were Barbara Walters, I would have been like, "Oh, come on Ann Coulter, didn't you see that nice film, The Pursuit of Happyness?"

That's all. I just wanted to correct that, publically.

I also like that the entire second paragraph of the Wikipedia page is devoted to why they misspelled "Happyness," because that was always bothering me.

She's a woman who understands

DID YOU KNOW? The movie Zoolander was banned in Malaysia.

Quote of the day: "I am the enforcer." --Ann Coulter

Sometimes I wonder if I am really meant to be a scientist, a researcher, if I should really be in grad school, what is happening here. Then I have these little moments of scientific realization in my everyday life and I realize that no, Virginia, everything really is going to be okay.

You all know that Special K is my favorite cereal in the world. It is just delicious. Just the right amount of sweetness, and it stays pretty crispy in milk. I love it. It is a 10+.

You probably also know that it is a diet cereal for women. Seriously. It is The Girlie Show of cereals. The logo on the box is a woman's waist. All the TV commercials are filled with women running and going for modest bicycle rides. The backs of all the boxes have pictures of women describing how they lost six pounds in two weeks by eating Special K or Special K diet bars for two meals a day. No, no. It is not even The Girlie Show of cereals. That is too butch. It is The View of cereals.

And so you know that the fact that Special K is my favorite cerealbrings me extraordinary shame. Check out the back of the box from which I ate this very morning:

eat breakfast, weigh less

why breakfast?

It's simple. Research shows that women who eat breakfast, like the Kellogg's Special K Breafast, weigh less. It's delicious and it's good for you... Just like Kellogg's Special K

When you enjoy the delicious Kellogg's Special K Breakfast: a serving of Kellogg's Special K cereal, skim milk, fruit, and coffee, you'll be eating a satisfying meal that has less than 250 calories, and can help you stay on track.

And, you know, my first thought upon reading this, while I was standing there eating my bowl of Kellogg's Special K with bananas and 2% milk:

1) Who did this study?
2) Why does Kellogg's say "women?" Did they do it only on women?
3) What did they control for? Maybe women who eat breakfast also tend to exercise more.
4) Correlation does not imply causality.
5) I am a scientist.
6) Special K is delicious
7) I hate myself for liking Special K.
8) Special K made me feel inferior without my consent.

Sorry, Eleanor.

When yer 22

DID YOU KNOW? There have been 12 arrests in the past year at the Chuck-E-Cheese where my 7th birthday party was held.

If you're going to be sick anyway, there's no point in staying in on your birthday. So, despite the cold that was beginning to rage inside of me earlier this weekend, I went out. I went out. I had a great time. Saying that I felt like death this morning would be an insult to death. The only time I have felt worse is that time senior year when I took Nyquil and I dreamt that the universe was collapsing on itself and woke up on the bathroom floor crawling into the shower when Sam's Mom came in and was like, "You are not going to school today."

So I celebrated my second day of being 23 by staying in bed until 6 PM. Then I went to the grocery store to get some orange carrot juice, because I have this hypothesis that orange things are incredibly healthy. Now I'm up and around and my mucus is clear, so I think it's only going to be a matter of time before I'm in fighting shape again.

In other news, have you ever seen the video for Coldplay's "Viva La Vida"?



I swear, this is going to be the rick roll of the next generation. Like, seriously, this is just ridiculous. The rose. The dissolving into petals. The bell ringing. The "help I am Chris Martin and I am getting blown over by a giant fan" choreography. Oh man. Those hand motions during the instrumental break. It is fantastic.

I like making fun of people.

Got a feeling 23 is gonna be a good year

DID YOU KNOW? According to PETA, fish are now called "sea kittens."

My birthdays are generally not that exciting. Just in general. It works out that way. Like, usually I'm all, "What a great birthday! There was an awesome episode of 30 Rock on. And I saved money on groceries." I usually blame the snow or the rain or the prelim exams. Blerg.

So this year I was looking forward to celebrating the publication of a calendar with my picture in it. I'm November. I know! That was the first thing I saw when I opened my mail today. And I was like, "Oh, just in time for my birthday!" I really thought that was going to be the most exciting thing. Then I noticed that I had a package from Uncle Dennis, and, well, by 11:55 PM, I had received three of the greatest birthday presents ever, seriously, ever, in history.


1) a TransLink pass from AC Transit
2) a book signed by Brian May, from Uncle Dennis
3) a gift certificate to Truck, obtained by Ruthie and financed by many of my other friends

Apparently Truck had never even thought about selling gift certificates before and started only at Ruth's suggestion. That's right. I have the first Truck gift certificate ever distributed. For reals. Basically, I am famous. I feel like a Greek god.

This is already the best birthday ever and it has not even happened yet.

Your mother should know

DID YOU KNOW? New York City smelled like maple syrup again yesterday.

I love the word "phlogiston." I was just reminded of this today. My favorite use of the word "phlogiston" ever was in a Jeopardy! tournament of champions. I think it was the Ultimate Tournament of Champions, the one before Ken Jennings won 72,000 games and necessitated the Super Ultimate Tournament of Champions like five years later. Anyway, it was part of the final series of games and the Final Jeopardy! category was "12-letter words." The clue was something like: "Ancient Greeks believed this to be a fifth element, superior to earth, water, wind, and fire." One person had no idea and guessed nothing, but the other two both guessed "What is phlogiston?" One of them even tried to awkwardly misspell it so that it would be close to 12 letters. The other dude was just defiant. I just thought it was weird that both of them came up with the same bizarre, obscure same time, and also that the word "phlogiston" was on television.

The correct question was "What is quintessence?"

Speaking of phlogiston, I realized I never posted those pictures of Christmas in Virginia that I had promised, so here you go.


Sam's Mom will like that she looks pretty good in this picture. I like mountains of meat, so I like it too.


All you have to do is deep fry bread dough, basically, and then put out some sugar for people to dip it in, and you will have the most delicious Christmas breakfast of all time. Aunt Dolores is a master. Or mistress, I guess.


This is what they look like when they're done. Uncle Frankie is featured in perhaps my favorite genre of photograph, "people partially obscured by massive quantities of food."Fil is just a jubilant Santa Claus.

The rest of the day was spent cooking for another, oh, twelve hours. Here's Crystal and Aunt Dolores doing that thing you do to gnocchi to make them indented and pillow-like. Mine always kind of end up like mashed potatoes.

Yeah, mountains of meat. Rock.