- Take online personality test, with somewhat interesting judgments of who you are at the end.
- Alternately, find out what kind of cat you are.
- You already know I'm a Mahjong Solitaire junky; this Flash and Javascript site has a nice online version.
- A Spaceman Spiff online game!
- Mix and match LEGO minifig pieces to make your own minifig character.
- Add culture to your day with the Jelly Belly Art Gallery.
- If you go to the Alaska Eagles Nest Cam you have very good odds of seeing at least a baby eagle, if not a full grown eagle tending it as well.
- The Groovy Crochet Site will send you hurtling back in time to a more colorful, crochet-filled time. I'm hoping to get these links added to Chained Links in the near future. And I know I can't wait to make this skirt for my "elegant evenings at home or in faraway places."
- This essay on the pleasures of getting older and still living alone reminds me of conversations I've had with some of my graduate student friends, who are also dealing with getting older and still being students, which is its own, separate pleasure.
Some people will gain their notoriety at any cost. This article just makes me shake my head at its combination of rudeness and stupidity. Though, really, only the first line is necessary:
A man who tried to extinguish the "eternal flame" burning under the Arc de Triomphe by sitting on it has been treated in hospital for burns to his bottom.
I'm a huge Jane Austen fan, so I was pleased to see the "Ms. Austen & Co." page at Litrix Reading Room. It includes full versions of Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility as well as a few books by the Bronte's, Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, and others. It should be useful in looking for a quote or trying to remember which was the book with the three sisters. The same site also has Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome, which may be of interest to anyone who's read Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog and been curious about one of its inspirations. I've heard it's fairly interesting.
"The Fall Line-up: I want my GradTV" is a humorous call for more (or any) television about graduate students. [Thanks JRE!]
I think that I've pondered the clear lack of television and movies about graduate students before here. You can find smart undergrads doing research-type activities - Real Genius is a very good almost-grad-school movie, but it's not really the same. If you're willing to branch into professional schools, there's the excellent Paper Chase - the movie and the TV show. There have certainly been movies about medical school students.
The article linked above mentions the distasteful bit parts that grad students do get when they turn up on shows primarily about college:
On "Party of Five, " graduate student "Kirsten" inadvertently plagiarizes part of her dissertation and her committee revokes her Ph.D.; on "Cheers" perennial graduate student / waitress "Diane" annoys all the bar regulars with her obtuse theories and pseudo-intellectual remarks; on "Beverly Hills, 90210" graduate student TAs seduce the students in their sections.
Don't forget the evil TA in Road Trip that tries to get the hero flunked out of college, or the feeble, jealous grad students in Good Will Hunting. And to return to professional students, I'm sure we're all looking forward to the upcoming Legally Blond, in which Reese Witherspoon plays a vapid blonde sorority princess who, when her boyfriend leaves her to go to Harvard Law School, just up and decides that she'll go to Harvard Law School too. Her application is so different, they figure, why not let her in. Her style is so different, she actually succeeds. Because, really, if you're cute enough, perky enough, and blonde enough, that's all you need to get through a graduate degree.
Oh, and lest you think I'm making too much out of the whole "blonde" thing, go check out the movie's official web site. Besides the standard trailer and promotional photos, it's got blonde jokes, a blonde quiz, a blonde translator that converts sentences you type into "blondes' [...] own unique way of speaking", and a great moments in blonde history calendar, brought to you by Clairol, who wants you to know that being blonde really is better.
To return to graduate students in pop culture, though, I insist that the greatest portrayal of a graduate student in literature is Matt Ruff's physics grad student in Fool on the Hill, and really that's just for the following scene:
Of course a certain number of scientists have to go mad, just to keep the tradition alive.
He was working on his Doctorate and he had a room of his own, which is an important thing for a man to have. Several levels beneath Clark Hall, the room was small, roughly cubical, and private. The door had three locks on it. Once upon a time he had been in ROTC, but even though he had quit the program the Army still loved him. The Army always loves Physics Majors; they build things.
He had built something, all right. He sat in a swivel chair in the late hours of the morning spinning slowly around, looking at the things in his room, especially the thing. Nearest the door, a yellow rain slicker hung on a plain wooden coatrack. Then there was his desk, and on top of it a number of interesting item: a computer that helped him count; a clutch of stuffed animals; his lightning rods, black iron straight and true; a leather satchel to carry them in; and, in a plastic bottle that might have once contained aspirin, his Gobstoppers.
He did not know where the Gobstoppers had come from, that memory had been misfiled somehow, though he suspected they were the gift of some woman, some Lady. He did know that they were wonderful. The Gobstoppers gave him dreams, wonderful dreams, and ideas; and they made him laugh, sometimes for very long periods. An irreplaceable treasure, he did not worry about running out of them, for the bottle never seemed to grow empty. He took them, and laughed, and had no fear.
He took one now. A smile bloomed on his lips and he reached out to pet one of the animals.
"Tigger," he said, lifting the rag-stuffed toy out from between Pooh and Piglet. "Tigger, Tigger, Tigger."
Holding it, still petting it, he spun round again in his chair, focusing on the red wagon, the child's wagon, that occupied one bare corner of the room. Bolted onto the back of the wagon was a crude tail of twisted hemp; painted on its side in white paint was the one word "Eeyore." Sitting inside the wagon was the thing he had built.
What the thing was exactly was hard to tell because it had been almost entirely covered by yellow and black stickers reading DANGER -- RADIATION with the nuclear symbol stamped below the words. The thing was lumpy, halfway between a cylinder and a sphere, squat like a frog. A digital timer poked out of the sea of radiation stickers near the top.
"Tigger," the Doctoral Candidate -- who had visions of being a lightning rod salesman as well as a Physicist -- said, putting Tigger in the wagon too. Then he put Piglet next to Tigger, but left Pooh on his desk, looking forlorn. He bent to the digital timer, fiddled with it.
Andy Warhol had said that there would come a day when everyone in America would be famous for fifteen minutes. But a Doctoral Candidate surely deserves more than the average mortal, so he gave himself a full hour, pressed a button to start the countdown.
He put on his rain slicker and a pair of yellow boots produced from a drawer, double-checked a flyer (RALLY OUTSIDE THE STRAIGHT, 11:30 A.M.) and gave Pooh a parting pat on the head.
"Gonna make it rain, Winnie" he said. Then he slung his satchel full of lightning rods over his shoulder and, pulling the red wagon behind him, he walked out, not even bothering to lock the door as he marched off to collect his share of celebrity.
After many, many years, I went out and tossed a softball around with a friend the other night. I was very pleased to find out that I don't totally suck, and I might not even throw like a girl. I then continued in my enjoyment of throwing things at my department's picnic this weekend, where someone brought a Kubb set they made themselves. Kubb is a game which seems to have both Swedish and German variants that basically entails throwing sticks at wooden blocks to knock them over. The game starts with five blocks lined up on opposite sides of a court, and you try to knock all of the blocks opposite you over before your opponent does. Any blocks that you knock over, your opponent has to throw onto the court and knock over before they can begin to knock over the blocks at the far end. And if you knock down the large king block in the middle before all of your other blocks are knocked down, you lose the game - like in pool with the eight ball. I thought it was really fun, and it looked very simple to make up a set.
I saw Shrek this weekend, and it was a funny, cute movie. I always forget that Mike Myers is a good actor, and he did a great job with this character. The movie had its overly-gross moments (such as the ogre using eyeballs as cocktail onions), but it seems to have been a substitute for making him violent and murderous. Probably a reasonable trade-off in a PG movie. There were lots of "cameos" by various fairy tale characters, and the animation was well done. I don't remember any particular scenes standing out as amazing animation, but it was all consistently good. It's worth seeing if you have any tolerance at all for animated movies. It's certainly better than the standard Disney stuff that's come out recently.
If you're looking for movies to avoid, though, check out the Brunching Shuttlecock's review of A Knight's Tale. Oh my...
Despite being a rousing, exhilarating, amusing and vivacious flick, the main problem with the new "I'm gonna slam a long stick into your chest" flick, A Knight's Tale, is that it just ain't right.
I've scoured the web, read the books, searched high and low, but have been completely unable to find one report of a large crowd in the Middle Ages bursting into a chorus of Queen's "We Will Rock You."
Penzeys Spices has the greatest catalog in the world - you can go to their website to request a copy, or just download the pdf for it yourself. They have every type of spice you've heard of, and they accompany each spice with a description of what it is used for and in what types of quantities. The friend who loaned me their catalog was pleased with the quality of spice she received from them as well. If you like to cook at all, you should definitely check this site out. I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to order... [Thanks AG!]
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