Since moving here, I've found that this area lacks many the resources that I enjoyed in Fort Wayne, such as access to independent and foreign films. There's a theater that shows a few independent movies, but most of the really interesting releases never make it this far into no man's land. I've subscribed to Netflix in order to fill this void. So far, my movie cue consists of a couple classic movies (Young Mr. Lincoln, Once Upon a Time in America), a few favorites (Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark), and a few oddities (Primer, Oldboy). There is quite a bit of catching up to do, and if anyone would like to recommend a good movie, feel free. Netflix offers an RSS feed of my cue, and if I can figure it out, I plan to put the list in the sidebar here so that it updates automatically. Because I can.

Last Wednesday I went to the student center to see Dr. Brian Greene speak about string theory. He did a great job explaining it without the insanely complex math involved, and explained where his research may lead. The basic idea is that subatomic particles are made of little strings and shapes that vibrate, and the vibration patterns are what determine what the particle is. The size of these, as near as anyone can tell, is 10 to the -35 meters. Pretty darn small. He also talked about the possibility of other dimensions- not in a sci-fi sense, but in terms of an experiment to be performed in Geneva in the next few years. Fascinating stuff, even to a non-physicist.

Something else of note: there's a new British TV series called "The IT Crowd" about IT workers in the basement of an office building. It's pretty funny, and the network has made it available on Google video: link, and a link to the proper episode order: link

"Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair." -John Steinbeck

This is from his acceptance speech for the 1962 Nobel prize in literature. It resonates with me, hence it goes here for digital posterity.

First off, here's an embedded Google text ad from the spam folder section of my gmail account:




Spam, bacon, sausage and spam, if I'm not mistaken. Google ads work by scanning the page for any word that matches the meta tag words in their ad database. As a result, the overzealous ad script found "spam" (used as a negative term here) and served up an ad for MRE-grade meat-based spam fajitas in a quantity that could satisfy the Supreme Court, provided that Stevens declines, citing seniority over canned meat (see Marbury v. Hormel). The option of extra salsa is proposed and left to the discretion of the court.

School keeps me pretty busy. I'm working on a research paper about the portrayal of banks in the movie The Grapes of Wrath. I'm enjoying the research, oddly enough. It's a history paper, so everything is based in fact- no theory at all. The great depression was a more volatile time than I thought it was, and the writing from the era is really interesting. Tomorrow night I'm going to hear Dr. Brian Greene speak in the student center. He writes books about space and time, and people say that he was really interesting the last time he was here.

Also tomorrow- Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-men #13 arrives in my pull file at Alter Ego. Shortly thereafter it will be read on my couch, re-read, flipped through, and passed on to Gerry to sit in his pile of my comics for six months until he has time to read it.

I'm not actually dead, though the prospect loomed unnervingly close in the past two weeks when I had the flu and then a pretty bad sore throat. I couldn't talk, but it took me a few days to realize this, as I don't talk much. I came down with the flu during the last DS Halo fragfest- cold sweats, nausea, headache, the works. I still managed to win four out of five rounds either by myself or with the help of Michelle. The last round the kill count was set at 25, and the level was huge for four people, and all I could think was "I can't go home to bed until this is over." I couldn't even see straight when I shotgunned my 25th kill in the back of the head. I got home, walked into the kitchen, and threw up for the first time in four years. The last time I vomited was when I got sick and had to postpone getting my wisdom teeth removed, thus missing seeing Zwan in Columbus, Ohio- right across from the Ohio State University.

So, I'm feeling better now. Still coughing a bit, much to the joy of my lumbering brick-footed upstairs neighbor. The parents have provided much in the way of medicine and food during this, and I'm gradually eating all of it like Pac-Man.

The semester is going pretty well. I had blocked out all kinds of time to work on my various projects, and recently I've spent this time sleeping and trying to stay at least minimally current with classes.