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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
the dill pickle to your cheese's LiveJournal:
| Thursday, July 16th, 2009 | ||||
| 8:27 am | The New York Times just discovered that some people are okay with being fat. | |||
| Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | ||||
| 6:41 pm | ||||
| Saturday, July 11th, 2009 | ||||
| 8:23 pm | Sometime a couple weeks ago, the University City District (which is basically an arm of Penn; yes, I know, they get some of their money from Drexel and USP, but who cares?) put up flags saying "Baltimore Avenue" on Baltimore Avenue between 45th and 50th They also put up streetlights, which I am ambivalent about because they make it harder to sleep. Apparently while I've been gone people got pissed off and took matters into their own hands. Actually, it's not clear to me whether anybody actually did anything other than put up flyers bitching about if (cf. the bumper stickers from a couple summers ago: "this is west philly, university city is a marketing scheme" and "this is lenapehoking, west philadelphia is colonialism".) can anybody who's actually there tell me? | |||
| Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | ||||
| 8:15 am | Estimates of what it costs to take a cab from Ithaca to [insert faraway place here]. Most expensive entry on the list: they estimate $650 to Boston or Pittsburgh. | |||
| Saturday, July 4th, 2009 | ||||
| 12:20 am | 82% of Americans would choose living in U. S. over anywhere else. From the front page of conservapedia, which says: "As America prepares to celebrate its 233rd birthday this weekend, 82% of American adults say that if given the choice of living anywhere in the world, they would still choose to live in the United States. Just 11% (most likely all liberals) say they would not choose to live in America." Um, could this just be that moving is scary? This is meaningless unless we had similar numbers for other countries. | |||
| Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | ||||
| 3:06 pm | why does my right shoe wear out much faster than my left shoe? the rubber sole of one of my shoes now features a bunch of strips of shredded rubber. fortunately I knew this pair of shoes was on its last legs. I bought a replacement pair weeks ago. and these shoes have also gotten to the point where there seems to be chalk permanently embedded in them. I never got chalk on my shoes before from teaching! I think the classroom I had this session had extra-high gravity. (no, this is not the only pair of shoes I own.) | |||
| Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 | ||||
| 10:02 pm | Why isn't July 4 called "America Day"? (Although if you Google "America Day", even with the quotes, the first hit is the Wikipedia article Independence Day (United States) And I'd like to wish a happy Canada Day to the Canadians. Even though it is not actually Canada Day anywhere in Canada yet, and it won't be for another twenty-seven minutes. | |||
| Monday, June 29th, 2009 | ||||
| 7:28 pm | Name a very long novel. (I suspect that there are some semi-canonical answers to the question. I want to see if I'm right.) η (Tues. 1:27 pm): Answers so far. (Page counts usually from Wikipedia, sometimes from Amazon.) Tolstoy, War and Peace (1475 pp.) x5 Wallace, Infinite Jest (1079 pp.) x4 Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (&infty; pp.) x2 Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1368 pp.) x2 Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (760 pp.) Stephenson, Quicksilver (944 pp.) Melville, Moby Dick (922 pp.) Richardson, freakin Clarissa (1536 pp.) Palliser, Quincunx (1221 pp.) Joyce, Ulysses (736? pp.) Adams, Maia (1136? pp.) King, The Stand (823 pp.) "something by Dickens" Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (864 pp.) Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1037 pp.) In case you're wondering, the first four I thought of -- the four I thought of while walking home right before I made this post -- were War and Peace, Infinite Jest, Atlas Shrugged, and Les Miserables. I have read two and one third of these four books. (That's all of Les Miserables and Atlas Shrugged, and a third of Infinite Jest.) I have a copy of War and Peace but I haven't opened it yet, because I got it yesterday. Those four were the "canonical" answers I was thinking of; given a little more time I probably would have added Ulysses. I didn't realize how long A la recherche du temps perdu is so I probably wouldn't have thought of it. (Also, what is the "correct" English title of that book? I've seen both "Remembrance of Things Past" and the more literal "In Search of Lost Time".) Wikipedia has a list of longest novels, which rather predictably has a talk page full of wankery. Surprisingly, it doesn't include anyone trying to argue that The Lord of the Rings is a single novel. | |||
| 2:48 pm | ||||
| Thursday, June 25th, 2009 | ||||
| 8:28 pm | "In the past, a professional entertainer, one of the inventors herein, has incorporated dance steps in his recorded video performances, wherein he and other dancers would lean forward beyond their center of gravity, thereby creating an impressive visual effect. This effect was accomplished by the use of cables connecting a harness around the dancer's waist with hooks on a stage, thereby allowing the dancer to lean forward at the required degree. However, since this requires stagehands to connect and then disconnect the cables, it has not been possible to use this system in live performances. Moreover, the cables obviously restricted arm and body movements." -- from a patent for "Method and means for creating anti-gravity illusion". | |||
| Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 | ||||
| 10:24 pm | proof that the Nats aren't a real baseball team From a press release by the Washington Nationals: "About the Washington Nationals Baseball Club The Washington Nationals Baseball Club, owned by the Washington, D.C.-based Lerner Family, was relocated to the District in 2005 from Montreal. The team competes in Major League Baseball's National League East. The Nationals play 81 home games each season at Nationals Park, the 'Home of the National Pastime in the Nation's Capital', located in Southeast Washington." Somewhat charitably, I suppose I could interpret this as just saying that the Nats haven't been in Washington that long. Still, it seems silly that the press release has to say "really! we have a major league baseball team!" This is perhaps because it is debatable whether the Nats are actually a major league team. | |||
| 4:09 pm | ||||
| Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | ||||
| 6:44 pm | Voice Post
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| 11:24 am | Rise of the "gastrosexual". (From the Daily Fail, via metafilter. Apparently from last July; the Internet failed in not bringing this to me until now.) Apparently, some men cook. And some of them are doing it because they are attracted to women who eat. I think that maybe they are trying to compare these to men who cook because they are attracted to men who eat. It won't surprise you to learn that there's a report full of PR crap backing this up, and in the end a food company made up this word. A food company called "PurAsia", which automatically fails because there's more than one kind of food in Asia. Asia's a big place with lots and lots of people. | |||
| Saturday, June 13th, 2009 | ||||
| 10:34 am | In my experience, it seems like: - if you live in a city, you can receive mail at your home (through a mailbox or a little hole in the door) but you have to find a mailbox to send it; - if you live in a suburb, you can receive and send mail from a mailbox on the edge of your property. (But you have to walk out to the mailbox to get your mail, because your house doesn't come up to the property line, which sucks if it's raining, cold, etc.) - I don't know what happens if you live in a rural area. am I right? | |||
| Sunday, May 31st, 2009 | ||||
| 7:05 pm | My cell phone, which is four years old, has officially reached the point where people look at it and say "omg that thing still works?" As in, this actually happened (for the first time?) last night. I'd take a picture of it, except: a) it's not a camera phone, and b) even if it were, I couldn't use it to take a picture of itself! (seriously, I have a camera somewhere, but I don't even remember where it is.) | |||
| Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 | ||||
| 11:04 pm | Fun with alter egos This paper by George Andrews on partitions of numbers includes a reference to L. Euler, Introduction to Analysis of the Infinite, transl. by J. Blanton, Springer, New York, 1988. I can only assume that J. Blanton is Kentucky Joe Blanton, who pitched seven shutout innings and struck out eleven for the Phillies tonight. In honor of Joe Blanton's home state, people who prove me wrong (which isn't hard) will be forced to eat "Kentucky" "Fried" "Chicken". | |||
| Friday, May 15th, 2009 | ||||
| 10:45 am | A Latinist explains why diplomas should be in English. But if they are, I won't be able to make the joke about how I'm spending five years working for a piece of paper I can't read. | |||
| Thursday, May 14th, 2009 | ||||
| 11:32 pm | Phillies paying visit to White House. The two most recent comments, out of six total: "they're gonna walk in there and its gonna look like the set from Fresh Prince lol." and "THE HEADLINE SHOULD READ THE PHILLIES VISIT THE BLACK HOUSE LOL" (apparently they delete offensive comments, so I'm not surprised the two racist ones are the most recent; they haven't cleared them out yet.) that's right, folks, Obama is black. and this shit isn't funny. | |||
| Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 | ||||
| 10:27 am | I love when I hit the point where I'm reading papers and I can just skip the beginning because it's the same introduction that all the related papers have, since they're setting up notation and definitions that aren't entirely standard but that I'm already familiar with. It reminds me that I have actually learned something. | |||
