Friday, April 28, 2006

Mondegreen Thursday

Song heard in the car just now:
I could never make you oh so lewdly happy...

Eventually I figured out that it was actually absolutely happy. Ah well.

Thursday, April 20, 2006

I screw for a living

So the past couple of days have been busy days at work. We're setting up an experiment, which means I've been running up and down ladders carrying equipment that is some combination of heavy, awkward, expensive, so fragile that it can be broken if you breathe on it, laboriously handmade, or irreplaceable. Oh, or radioactive. (It's somewhat less nerve-wracking carrying these things myself than watching other people carry them.) We've had to make a lot of changes to the set-up, which means I've been putting in and taking out the same twenty or thirty screws over and over again. All of a sudden, in the middle of one of these tasks this afternoon, it hit me: I screw for a living.

...although not perhaps in the way my mother feared I would end up doing back when I was eight and showing a marked preference for barbies and dress-up over trucks and lego.

Friday, April 14, 2006

blogging JOY!!

I've just started a work blog. Like, a blog to help me keep track of my work, and to share my results with my colleagues. Whe I told Corey about it, he said that the only thing that could make it geekier, or less generally comprehensible, is if it were written in Elvish. I know that publishing the link is just going to get me more snide comments, but anyway, it's here.

The name comes from an Eddie Izzard sketch, about how he doesn't have techno-fear, he has technoJOY!!! and will recklessly install computer hardware without ever cracking open the manual. Similarly, I've got simulation JOY and will simulate breakfast cereal, given half a chance.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

question

How lazy does one have to be before buying new pants seems like a better idea than doing laundry?

Because however lazy that is, that's how lazy I am.

Monday, April 03, 2006

weekend quiz

So I spent this weekend in London with my dear friend Elisa and her S.O. Alex. We hung out on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon with three of their friends. Among the six of us, we have at least eight advanced degrees (it might be more, not sure) in subjects as diverse as mediaeval french, physics, philosphy, and law, are natives of six different countries, speak six languages (not counting Latin), and have lived in at least two countries besides our native countries. What do you think the chief activity was, while we were eating sushi, drinking wine at an obscure-but-excellent wine bar, and watching the Cambridge-Oxford rowing race?
(a) Discussing current events and our own personal theories of politics, economics, and literature.
(b) Recounting stories of our many and diverse travels.
(c) Making animal noises.

While watching the boat race, the right sort of picnic is
(a) Kir and brie.
(b) Diet coke and Doritos.
(c) Kir and Doritos.
(I think that last option must be an example of what Annene-of-Orkut calls Dada food.)

And a personal question: I like to wear my hair in braids
(a) for the convenience of having it out of my face.
(b) for the alternative-skater-Lolita effect.
(c) so that I can hold the ends above my head and pretend to have antennae, or in front of my face and pretend to have a moustache.

The answers should be obvious.

It was a good weekend.