Not burned up:

On the off chance that anyone saw this article, the fire was across the street from us. We're fine; we didn't even know it happened until Sudeep emailed. The building looks totally destroyed, though, and I hope the people who lived there have found somewhere to stay for a while.

Dinner last night:

I made boullibaisse, which involves as many types of ocean fish as I could find, tomatoes, a lot of spice, and pureed cod. Surprisingly, it turned out well, though I imagine it was pretty inauthentic. With it, we had salad and pie and ice cream. Pretty low-key and quite good. Of course, it means my desire for sushi today is nil, and combined with the cold and the vast quantity of programming I have to do (random number generators? not my friend) means that I'm not going. Since I got nothing done yesterday, I'll probably have to stay in tonight too, but honestly with the weather and my finances that is probably a good thing.

Anyway, fish good. People good. Not too much cleaning left to do, good. Wine good (and more on that shortly).

Needless carding:

I have been planning a dinner during the past week and have been trying to decide what sort of wine to serve with it. Google searches gave me a site called eatdrinkdine.com, which has a lot of fairly interesting information on wines and what they go with. But as any of you who clicked on the link have discovered, you have to answer some questions about your age (basically whether you are of the legal drinking age of your country of residence). What? It's not like you are going to buy wine from them. I'm just reading about them. Why should it matter if I am 16 or 30?

If you go to the section, "Why do we need to ask these questions?" they claim: "We need to ask you these questions as this site promotes wines, an alcoholic drink. As we support responsible drinking, we therefore need to ensure that you are over the legal drinking age and that you are legally allowed to view this site in the country that you are in." Oh, that's right. You have to be 21 to watch beer commercials in the US. I forgot.

On not-so-fine wine:

I've decided that since I'm more or less a grownup, I want to figure out what wines I like. So I'm going to write down what I've had and whether I've liked it or not so that I will know what to buy again and what to shun like the plague. Be forewarned that I don't actually know anything about wine so none of these will involve technical terms like "bouquet" or "yeasty." They should appear at a rate of 1-2 per week, depending on how much of a lush I am.

So here goes.

di Montefiascone dry white 2001 ($7.69 at the Coop). I picked this up while walking past the wine racks of the Coop. Usually a big mistake. But I like dry whites and Italian wine a lot and the price tag made it even more appealing. A decent dry Italian for less than $8 would be a wonderful thing to have.

Unfortunately, this is not a decent wine. It's completely tasteless. I guess you can describe it as dry since it isn't sweet, but I think that's a bit of a stretch. You can't even really call it bad, since it's basically just 24-proof water. Will said that it tastes like the house wine that you would buy in unmarked jugs in some Roman pizzeria, which is probably the best way of describing it. It claims to have a bitter aftertaste that I couldn't taste at all. Not that I could taste anything about this wine.

It does smell good and is pretty, a nice yellow color.

The Verdict: Utterly tasteless, boring, all the negatives of crappy white wine, though you can't exactly say it tastes bad. I'll finish the bottle, but I won't be buying another. Ever again.

Kitten:

My roommate's cat is so cute. He's obsessed with my bed, which is about six feet off the ground. This morning he sat on my desk and jumped for it. He almost didn't make it too; his little paws grabbed onto the edge and he had to pull himself up from there. But now he's up there and doesn't want to come down...

Forgotten Sons:

"You're just another coffin on its way down the emerald aisle
When your children's stony glances mourn your death in a terrorist's smile
The bomber's arm placing fiery gifts on the supermarket shelves
Alley sings with shrapnel detonate a temporary hell
Forgotten Sons"

Sometimes Marillion's music can sound so hopeless-- "and you listen with a tear in your eye to their loathsome betrayals, and your only reply is Slainte Mhath" but mostly they're just angry. They write the music that Roger Waters wanted to write in his "Requiem for the Post-War Dream," full of anger at the betrayal of the working class in Britain. Forgotten Sons is about the British soldiers who died in Ireland since the Troubles started.

Interestingly to me is that the anger in this song is aimed not at the people who pulled the trigger and killed the soldier, but at the people in the British government who ordered the war ("the nameless faceless watchers who parade the carpeted corridors of Whitehall"), who send soldiers out to get their fifteen minutes of posthumous fame.

Marillion is definitely the most interesting band to come out of Scotland in the early '80s and you should really listen to them if you have any interest in postwar angst.

Easily amused:

Well, I am. Badgers! And Matt singing the badger song is comedy gold.

Ghost town:

Campus always looks so dead early Friday morning, but never more so than when it's snowing and windy. You can even pretend the snow is sand and start looking for a giant tumbleweed to start rolling across the circle. Or maybe that's just me.

Embarrassing revelations:

Tonight one of my friends who shall remain nameless revealed that he owned nine Mariah Carey CDs, and that he had all of them with him in Chicago.

Phone-related neuroses:

So what do you do when you're in physics lecture and you get three missed calls from a number you don't recognise in the span of four minutes? Do you:

a) Call the person back once lecture ends
b) Get up from lecture and call the person from the bathroom
c) After class, look the number up in a reverse telephone directory to at least identify the city the caller is from from area code
d) Ignore the call
e) After doing b), decide it's probably someone calling from their office and wait until after normal business hours to call and hear the person's voicemail

Just trying to determine how neurotic I am.

USITE:

I'm at USITE Reg listening to a two people brainstorming on a letter (originally spelled lterr-- pirate letter!) to the Maroon about Bush's State of the Union for a class. Their insight for the day-- "the AIDS epidemic is as important as the stuff that is happening in Baghdad." Says who? Clearly not Bush. It's all a matter of personal opinon. To the mother whose son died in Iraq, the war on terrorism is more important that the AIDS pandemic; to the black man on the DL, AIDS is probably more important. It's all way too simplified, and while I think Bush should be spending way more money on controlling the AIDS pandemic, I don't think that the letter to the editor will actually be an insightful look into reasons supporting this view.

Insightful? The Maroon? Right.

Job fair, redux:

There's another job fair next week, out in Oak Brook. You have to apply to get invited to go, though, so fingers crossed. There are some people there I might actually be interested in; NSA, State, Sandia National Laboratories, and Lutron Electronics jumped out at me. I'm off to the Reg to email my resume in now. Stupid lack of Microsoft Word on my computer.

Hopefully, if I do get to go to this one it will turn out better than last time.

On domestic chores:

So it's hard to make a loft bed. Like, really hard. But it's worth it when you're making the bed with really nice sheets your mother mailed to you (which is, I admit, kind of sad). Thanks, Mom!

The best reality show ever:

Susan and I came up with an idea for the best reality show ever. It would feature a raft made of people lying down and lashed together (and maybe wearing SCUBA gear-- not to clear on that). And I would sail around the world on this raft, which would be called Man-Tiki. We figured I could even use people as oars.

I bet Fox would pick this up. Maybe they'd even do a live feed.

Tea and other things:

I bet Sudeep will be proud of me. I just bought a Brown Betty teapot online. It should be here in a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, I have the patience of a toddler, so that kind of sucks. Oh well. I'm currently drinking out of tea bags.

Highlights of my weekend:

1. From the calculus class I'm TAing: "Andy is two miles from shore in a rowboat. He looks inland and sees, six miles down the shore, flames billowing from his house."

2. From Joe (technically last night, but oh well): "I sat on the bench [at the MCA] and they yelled at me. There was some poem carved on it. How was I supposed to know? It was just with the other benches."

3. My roommate's cat was really scared of the people who were here to fix our ceiling, so he ran into my room and fell asleep on the radiator cover. It's the cutest thing I've ever seen.

4. Susan, Will and I went to the Jewel Osco at Roosevelt and bought about $100 worth of meat and 90 cans/bottles of diet soda between us.

5. The first and second years on the college bowl team really enjoyed talking about one particular song that I played on the way to Michigan. Also, we found a scoresheet for a game between the University of Western Ontario and an American team labelled "USA vs. USA Jr" which amused me enormously, though I imagine any Canadians seeing it would have had a different reaction.

All in all, a good weekend, despite the fog and crazy drivers in Michigan. I thought everyone in Michigan moved to Florida in January. Shows what I know, I guess.

I hate titles:

I'm back from Michigan and am absolutely exhausted. The trip was good, but more tomorrow. I have a pile of work waiting for me but I'm too tired to deal with it right now. I think about half an hour of some amusing movie and I'll be ready for bed. Dude, I'm old.

Michigan:

So I'm off to Ann Arbor tonight, since I've always dreamed of going to Michigan in January. Or something. So anyway, not so much on the update front till Sunday, I imagine. And if you leave near me/in the same apartment as me and would like to go to Dominick's downtown on Sunday, I can provide the automobile.

Arrgh:

Why does everything have to be so complicated? He's cute and funny and British. Why can't he be cute and funny and British and living in Chicago?

Kinkos (sucks):

So I just spent an hour and five minutes faxing seven pages of text from Kinkos. I think I could have walked them to DC in that amount of time. But I did get to be the fax machine expert. Three different people asked me how to use the fax machine.

Sitemeter watch:

To the person who found my site searching for "cute boys at the University of Chicago," good luck with that.

Day 3 (redux):



So I lied and day 3 was not Cape Sounio but rather the return trip from Hydra. So the text is up at far from home and the pictures are located here.

Day 3 (Cape Sounio):



Photos from Cape Sounio are posted here. Text will be up this afternoon.

Elgin Marbles:

The Greeks have engaged a new PR firm to help with their wish to have the Elgin marbles returned. I'm not sure that a PR firm will do them much good, though. Polls have consistently shown that a majority of the British public support the return of the marbles, despite the objections of the head of the British Museum (would his title be curator?). The Greeks need to persuade one man rather than a population, and PR firms aren't generally very successful at that.

Now it could be the Greeks are hoping to create intolerable public pressure for the marbles' return. I don't think the average Brit cares enough to lobby his MP, though; it's one thing to think in the abstract that the marbles should be returned and it's another to actually do anything about it.

I'm not even sure whether I think they should be returned. Greece's record for protecting its antiquities is not particularly good, and something like those should not be lost. The new gallery that they are building on the (unlikely) chance that they get the marbles for the Olympics does sound really cool though.

And, of course, the question remains: if you start returning the Elgin marbles, does everything have to be returned? I know the Egyptians are looking for a deal on some obelisks, and I'm sure the Indian government would like some stuff back as well (really you can include just about any country here). Can you say the rules are different because the marbles are a national treasure, and, if so, who defines "national treasure"?

Employable:

So I need a job. Not right this second (I am currently employed, though I'm not exactly racking in the dough here. Someone should encourage the math department to raise what they pay us TAs a bit). No, I need a job that will start in approximately 5 months. I need a real job.

Does anyone have any ideas for me to apply to? I'm a math major with some science policy experience, interested in working in either science policy or some sort of applied math/engineering lite. I've applied to NSA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, DIA, and will talk to the CIA soon. Other options I'm checking out include NASA, the Navy, and GE. I'm particularly interested in private sector companies that might be willing to hire me as an engineer despite my lack of engineering background. I just don't want to do market analysis or anything involving other people's money.

Help!

Stating the obvious:

We're reading some of the Eddas for my Vikings class, and they are charming. Two quotes that really jumped out at me, both from "the Sayings of the High One" from the Poetic (Elder) Edda:

"Better to live than to be lifeless.
The living can hope for a cow."

and

"Heed my words, Loddfafnir, listen to my counsel;
you'll be better off if you believe me,
follow my advice, and you'll fare well:
if you want to travel over fjord and mountain,
don't forget food."

We choose to go to Mars:

With all the talk over on Crescat Sententia about Bush's plan to send a man to Mars, I was going to write a long post about why I think we should in fact go. Then I remembered that JFK did it for me, luckily enough since I am pretty busy right now.

"Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. "

There's plenty more in this speech, about some of the scientific benefits of space exploration (which so far have been worth far more than we've spent on manned space missions), but of course some of this is outdated.

Day 2 (Athens --> Hydra):



Day 2 is finally posted to Far from Home. For those of you who don't like the big words, the pictures are here. If you can't see this because of too much data transfer (likely-- yahoo sort of sucks), email me and I will invite you to the album on snapfish. Alternatively, if anyone knows any better photo album sites (ie, that I can make public), email me and I will put them there.

Stupid stuff to do:

So, several people have pointed out that I have been remiss in posting stuff from my trip (generally by saying you suck or something similar) and I am sorry about that. This week is just sort of crazy, though, with lots of moving related errands and classes and attempting to find something intelligent to say for tutorial and I just haven't had time to do much typing. Hopefully, after Friday I will basically be done with moving in and will have some time to relax and write.

Communication is key:

So, I sat in on a Commutative Algebra class yesterday and the professor asked if everyone had taken 257-258 (the honors algebra sequence). Everyone raised his hand except for one guy. So the professor asked him something like what's up with you. The guy answered "I'm the College Fellow [TA], so I haven't technically taken those classes."

In HP:

So I made it, though not without incident. My flight at 3:30 yesterday was cancelled, so I got a ticket on an 8 am flight into O'Hare. I had class and an appointment before 10, though, so I wanted to get out early. I went standby on a 6:40 am flight (I know), which involved getting up at quarter of four. I got to the airport and went to baggage services since my bag wouldn't get on a standby flight unless I checked it in myself. They find it in the computer, but not on the shelf (or I should say shelves, there are about 700 pieces of luggage down there. So anyway, I put in a claim, and I imagine they'll find it soon. But meanwhile, I need to go buy some more clothes and toothpaste. I did get on the 6:40 flight and got a cab with another U of C girl, so it wasn't too ridiculously expensive. And I got to the apartment, to class, to my appointment and now I don't have to be anywhere till 1:30.

Nap time.

Back to Chicago:

I'm heading back to Chicago tomorrow, so I'm currently involved in the 8 million and 1 things that are required before one moves for six months to a new apartment, to wit: I have no blanket at home. My blanket currently lives in Calumet and I can't get it out until I can rent a car, that is, not on Sunday afternoon. Ditto with the alarm clock. I'm going to bring my ancient and contractless cellphone just to solve that problem.

But uggh. I hate all this. Why can't I just go to sleep in Atlanta and wake up in Chicago?

New Years:

So I ended up doing none of the above and going for dinner and a movie. We saw Elf and I was really embarrassed to buy the ticket. I then went to these people's house and shot off approximately the GDP of Luxembourg's worth of fireworks. Really, it was ridiculous. It involved a lot of screaming, "get out of there" and "don't shoot that that way. they have dogs." Good times.