Month: January 2003

Homewrecker

By Evan — — Personal

A friend of mine (whose name shall be left out for privacy reasons) has a serious girlfriend. They’re thinking marriage. His significant other writes me to say:

Oh, yeah, XXXXX is also afraid I’ll dump him for you, thus the marriage proposal 🙂

If only I had thought to warn her about this earlier! This kind of thing happens because of me all the time. Maybe I should rent myself out to women with committment-phobic boyfriends… errr, that didn’t come out quite right…

One cool thing about this particular couple is that neither of them is particularly happy with diamonds, and so they’re considering alternative stones. A ruby, maybe. Good for them! I think it’s pretty clear that diamonds are bad news, and I heartily applaud their decision to be a little less traditional. If you can call a 75-year-old cartel-manufactured sales gimmick a “tradition”.

Anyway, I haven’t been posting much recently, nor have I been doing a good job of updating my Making of the Western Mind class notes. It’s amazing: when you have more free time, so much more of it goes to waste. Well, the notes are posted1, and I’ll be posting more often too.

And finishing the damn tutorial.

And flossing.

1. There’s no direct link to the MOTWM class notes, but if you’re in the 3rd year class, you should have the URL. Or if you need it, you can email me. Or, to be honest, the URL is eminently guessable. You’re smart people.

Vengeful Info-Ninjas

By Evan — — Miscellany

I’ve decided that Cory Doctorow is a brilliant man. Sure, I got a kick out of his opus, Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. I mean, who didn’t? But if you really want to move to the next level, I think you need to write a useful article on meta-information. It’s hard enough to write a comprehensible article on meta-information, let alone a funny one.1 I wait only for the day when I can cry, “Unleash the vengeful info-ninjas!” and really, like, mean it. I suppose this would require the purchase of A) a cat and B) a subterranean volcanic lair… but a man can dream, can’t he?

In Other News: Mom informs me that you can in fact sew a seam invisibly. Who knew that sewing technology had reached such an advanced state! Well, I’ll believe it when I see it. Also, I attended Jay’s New Years party (Festivus ’02.) Jay and Shelley were recovering from a nasty case of the flu, so a couple of the other guests and I worked in the kitchen early in order to get all the food ready. I made a double batch of mojitos, which were quite a hit, if I do say so myself. Now according to Hank Steuver of the Washington Post, mojitos are “out” this year. Then again, this is the same Hank Steuver who wrote that horrific article last year entitled ‘Harry’ and the Nation of Dweebs, in which he laments the rise of geek culture and fantasizes about beating up those who are weaker than he is. So really, I interpret his deprecation of my favorite drink2 as a badge of honor.

I also learned how to make salmon paté with no food processor. Just lots of chopping. “Peasant-style,” said one of the other cooks. (Just like great-grandmother in the shtetl used to make.) The pate was pretty good, but we made over two pounds of the stuff. We basically ran out of bread to put the pate on (although one guest was happily dipping tortilla chips into it), leaving us with about a pound of diced fish at the end of the evening. Shelley forced me to take it all home. That’s a lot of fish. I suppose that on the bright side, I hear that fish is pretty good for you. As my old professor Peter Saeta likes to say, “Every floating mass of buoyant hydrogenous precipitates possesses argentine surface properties.”

1. Contrary to Doctorow’s article, there are in fact no “Plam Pilots” currently on eBay… although they do have what looks like a good deal on a “JVC PLAM SIZED CAMCORDER!!!!!!!!!“.

2. Just for the record, I’ve been drinking mojitos for years — before they started appearing in GQ and the like, and way before James Bond saw fit to order one. Thank you.