I just updated my wordpress install (well, sort of; it turns out my host is running a way old version of mysql so I updated as far as I could) and am now sorting through old drafts of posts that I never finished. While doing so I found this: Sometimes after a lot of scotch [...]

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Many many years ago I was enthralled with a woman who was important to a man with whom I was also enthralled (complicated enough for you?) This woman–call her J., because that was her first initial–was enthralled with another man, who happened to be at Harvard at the time. J. and the man with whom [...]

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A mention of government cheese in another context sent me flipping back through old livejournal entries looking for something I wrote years ago about memory and food. I didn’t find the entry in question but I did find a link to The Surrealism Compliment Generator. The fact that this site still exists six or so [...]

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This morning, while driving through the Sepulveda Pass, I looked up to see what looked like a baby dragon flying overhead. Big wings, long thin tail. I suppose, given that this is LA afterall, it is possible that I was looking at some sort of movie prop. But given the lack of the normal annoyances [...]

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Someone in the office likes signs. Signs stating the obvious. In the women’s bathroom there’s a sign saying “don’t forget to flush.” I suspect that in reality the problem is not that people forget to flush but that they forget to check that flushing accomplished its intended goal (sometimes it takes a second try). Today [...]

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Earlier this week I had what I, upon waking, immediately characterized as a nightmare. In the dream I woke up and looked out my bedroom window to see a backyard lightly covered in white flecks. Snow. Overnight temperatures below freezing. Somehow in the dream the front of the house and the back were different microclimates [...]

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A couple of days ago a web acquaintance pointed out this shirt on thinkgeek. It has a drumset decal on the front that’s hooked up to a battery pack and speaker so that it actually plays when you tap it. Cool idea, right? Well, yes, but…. My first thought on seeing it was “oooh, that’s [...]

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So one of the side effects of living with a math/computer geek is that often reading material I would never encounter on my own appears around the house. For instance, Communications of the ACM, which I found open to the last page, title “Puzzled: Circular Food.” Skimming this my attention was drawn to the second [...]

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This morning in some web forum I happened upon I saw someone use the expression “reap what you sew.” I tend to visualize a lot of the language I encounter (yes, this can be problematic; no, you may not take advantage of this knowledge to try to gross me out). So what popped into my [...]

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What you see here is a screen shot from the online version of the economist. It’s a replication of a story from the print edition about the effects of the recent hurricanes on Cuba. Note the caption on the picture. Is there some Briticism I’m missing here in which woz translates to were? Yeah, I [...]

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