Alex in Wonderland

A last hurrah... Um. Well... Hurrah.

2005-09-19T20:46:00.000-07:00

So it's been a long long time since my last post, and I suspect this may well be the last. This blog is now officially a year old, assuming you don't notice the disappearance for months at a time towards the end - and that seems like a good life for a 'coming-to-a-new-country' blog.

Since I last wrote, a lot has happened, but with long stretches of same-old same-old boringness in between. Life is becoming predictable, and therefore less worthy of blather.

But happen, things have. I went rushing around Canada, I got my brother married (being MC allowing plenty of space for socially sanctioned and appreciated abuse of the poor bastard), I started and ended a rather serious relationship. I travelled around Portugal with my good friend Mike in immediate-having-broken-up mode, which was comforting and nice. There we learned many things, including the important lesson that the very same Atlantic ocean which is numbing-on-contact cold at mainland Portugal, is quite pleasantly warm a thousand km's off the coast at Madeira Island - a beautiful volcanic island that you all should visit should you ever head down Iberia way. And while At Madeira you should rent a car and drive as fast as your mountain gearing will permit (our crappy jeep maxed out at 85 k's an hour) headlong past the massive prettiness, and you should ride the modern gleaming cable car up the mountain at Funchal, and then take the sled back down. And when I say sled, I mean 'large wicker basket with a bench in it and 2 by 4 wooden runners nailed to the bottom'. Two gents in white shirts and boaters will launch the thing off for a small fee, then steer it down windy mountainside streets by strategically dragging their feet. Most exciting, and only slightly expensive. They'll even take an action photo of you half way down and knob you for it at the bottom.

My latest preoccupation lies in the considerably more depressing domain of trying to figure out what in heck I'm going to do next year. I'll spare you the details, and leave you just the emotion. Ahhh! And yes, I appreciate your "there there, it will be alright"s, but there is absolute factual and actuarial grounding for being scared, so.... well... Ahhh!

I am dealing with it by doing some work, looking into possibilities, and getting out for games of ultimate, Pilates, and joining a rock climbing club (just went on a weekend trip to beautiful Arkansas, where we camped packed in tents, existed without showers or socks (you would have to take them off all the time to put your climbing shoes on), exercised extreme-laid-back climber culture, and struggled up cliff faces. Or at least, *I* struggled, beginner that I am. But I do look quite resplendent in my new tight purple leather climbing shoes (with rubber crustings on the bottom). Rrrrr.

But now I shall sign off (oh, short entries! How long you have all prayed for them, and how I have rewarded you of late). I shall not leave you without a bite of wisdom, though: When obliged to wade through frigid Atlantic waters to get from, say, one beach past a headland to another, the critical consideration is whether the water reaches groin depth. If it does, you may become acquainted with our neologism of the trip: "Icticles".

Let the CoMO revolution begin! Possibly in a dress.

2005-05-17T01:11:00.000-07:00

Yae, a month since my last post. I think life is slowing down (or at least, the novelty value of it). Lucky you, dear reader, lucky you.

So I did my first ever foot race! It was a 5k run for breast cancer (to cure it, not receive it - honestly, who let you onto the internet?). I *think* my time was under half an hour, but I wasn't wearing my watch, so this depended on asking someone after the end line who may or may not have been confused. Anyway, the old knees gave me a bit of grumbling, but I just ran through that, and since then they seem to be getting better and better. But then they should, as going to the gym seems to be my main hobby these days.

Anyway, the true heroes of the race were these people who forwent the actual running in favour of standing along the course, just cheering the runners. It was all just give give give, so I made a point of cheering THEM on as I went past.

There was an end of term party at one of the prof's houses. Said house is perched on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a smallish lake with a floating dock in it, that is apparently the private domain of these surrounding houses. They apparently also have tennis courts and barbeques and such down there. Keep in mind that this is smack dab in the middle of Columbia, a 5 minute walk from my house.

The list of shows I have seen in the university's auditorium includes a Mozart Opera, two prominent authors reading, and now a drag show. It was fun, but a bit long. Yes, they dragged it out (sigh). Anyway, I learned several things about the world of drag.

First is the importance of a good name. The host was Miss Aida Buffet (hint to appreciating name: she was a self described "fat bitch"), and one of the other acts called herself Miss Frida Bancock. This one was even more rotund than Aida, and billed herself as "Columbia's largest living indoor attraction." Said line being funny the first 8 times it was used.

The other thing I learned is that to win a "Miss Gay State" title, it is not important to be stunningly good looking. What you need, it became apparent, is a killer celebrity impression. We had a former and current Miss Gay Missouri at the show, and one did a bang-on Celine Dion (complete with wig and pant suit), while the other nailed Tina Turner, complete with power tantrum moves. I'm sure this observation will help many of you in your future title-grubbing careers.

The star attraction, though, was Miss Coco Peru. She was, I think, the best live entertainment I have seen in years. She sang, she told poignant stories, she took passing shots at CoMO (having dinner with Mike and UnTexas girl a few weeks back we invented this acronym for the town, and decided that it was so cool we needed to promulgate it widely. Consider yourself promulgatized). She was, in short, fabulous, and if she's ever in your area (and she does get around) go see her. Cancel dinner plans, jilt the pope, I don't care what it takes, go see her. Consider yourself promulgatizicamated about this too.

Now you may think that our coinage of CoMO is just unspeakably cool, and the locals seem to agree - so much so that some of them have even adopted it retroactively, extending their usage prior to our invention! For example, at the drag show, one of the acts (three women dressed quite convincingly as boys) was the "CoMO homo's"... They apparently do a regular gig called the "CoMO homo show-mo" (Missouri styles itself the "show me" state). They did a few songs and a bit of amusingly transparent political theatre, with one of them in a big rubber Dubya head chasing around the statue of liberty, and jumping on a sign saying "Bill of Rights". The funniest part was at the end, where they ripped off their costumes to reveal t shirts that spelled "revolution" across the three of them - except Liberty couldn't get her green wrap off fast enough, and they all had stop and claw away at her outfit. It was a sight to warm an elementary school teachers heart.

Last thing: Columbia put on a "gallery crawl." About 14 places put up art, arranged wine and cheese, and for a few hours let you stagger back and forth collecting clues hidden in each place to assemble a puzzle that you could submit to win one of 5 prizes. The art was pretty good, though it's not REALLY my bag, but here's the REALLY weird part. I won! They just phoned me up and told me so. I am now the proud owner of a $20 gift certificate at a store on Broadway called "Cool Stuff". That's cool! I never win stuff (it's genetic - nobody in my family does). I guess nobody got around to telling the American authorities yet.

Still waiting for the jack-booted guys to kick down my door and rectify the mistake.

Ah well, signing out!
Alex

GRRRRR!!!!!

2005-04-09T19:47:00.000-07:00

You know what, it's been a "Grrrr" type of fortnight. Let me explain.

-My phone rang. A girl started talking. So far so good. But then:
"Mr. Newman?"
"No."
"Are you the person who owns Soco Club?"
So apparently I am now the proprietor of the local gay bar. I will update my CV forthwith.

Speaking of Soco's, my gay buddy (GB) here just met UnTexas Girl. Free advice: Never introduce your friends. While they're going through the bonding process they want to explore things they have in common, and the one thing they can agree on is that they both know you well enough to make fun of. It's a 2 on 1. Grrr.

Anyway, when UnTexas Girl expresses enthusiasm for going to Soco, GB gets all excited and says he hasn't had anyone to go with in years. I object, and he accuses me of never having wanted to go. How this confusion? Our prior exchanges on the matter:

GB: "We should go to the gay bar some time. You'd like it."
Me: "Sure, sounds good."

Apparently he "didn't believe me". He should know by now that I have no guile. I do frequently say things that are inaccurate, grossly deceptive, or at the very least wrong, but that's just natural born ignorance. Honestly I can't think of the last time I told an actual lie. [sigh]. Wait till I tell him that I own Soco's now. That'll show him. Grrr.

-The other night I was peddling innocently along a dark quiet side street at low speed, sitting upright with my hands off the bars, and managed to have one of my strangest crashes ever. Normally crashes put holes in me, but do little permanent damage to the bike. This one was backwards. The chain inexplicably flipped off and jammed between the cogs and the frame, jarring my feet to a halt, pitching me over sideways, and the bike end over end. Mr. leather jacket meant no blood loss for me, but the bike had a tri-bar pad ripped off, and a brake lever bent. I was able to fix everything else about it. See picture. Yikes! Hello bike shop! Grrr.
Follow up: Hello pretty warm friendly spring in Columbia. Yaaay! Heeelllo backlog at the bike shop meaning I can't get in for ages. Grrr.

This also has me debating if I need to shell out 50 bucks for a new helmet. They're only good for one hit. I don't THINK my head hit the ground... but what if it did? Grrr.

-Ok, so it's not as earth shattering as buying a microwave (my microwave makes wheezing noises now when it cooks - what does this mean?), but I bought two new appliances the other day. I now have little battery operated fountains installed on my desk that trickle water soothingly down steps, into a puddle of rocks. Joy. Not bad for 5 bucks each.

-I saw bell hooks talk (note: that's a name, despite (as Ali points out) pretentious lack of capitalization). I was excited because she was famous (i.e., mentioned in the Moxy Fruvous song "my baby loves a bunch of authors"). Without going into a rant, this is the first time in living memory that I have been so bored with a talk that I have leapt up and left as soon as questions started. Grrr. Stupid neo-feminist po mo blather.

-My good friend from Canada phones up and tells me about this girl I have to meet. Apparently she's nice, funny, "looks like me [Alex] with boobs", and lives in Ottawa. For the record, that gets scored as "good, good, yee, good, and oh well". For the geographically challenged, that puts her somewhere slightly under 2,000 kilometers away (or 1,100 miles for the metrically challenged). But I had a nice chat with her on the internet anyway, and it turns out that she is indeed funny, and apparently nice.
Life. [shrug]. Grrrr.

-So the other day my office building caught fire. Well, not literally the building, but some of the mulch and bushes outside, courtesy of a careless smoker no doubt. It was a super windy day (it's a windy town, even before I came here and opened my yap) so the fire was heavily fanned. I admired the smoke and flare ups with a colleague called Wendy while we speculated on the phone number of the campus fire service. Then a grounds guy stoped by, radioed them, and we spent a good 10 minutes dumping buckets and coffee mugs of bathroom tap water over the flames.

Eventually an enormous fire truck arrived. The professionals took one look, cracked out rakes, and did a little impromptu gardenning (seriously, they raked the dirt over). Eventually another grounds person arrived with a hose, and doused whatever fun was left. And that was the official cue to go back to work. Grrr.

Note: Update to classic children's song: "And green grass grew all around and around, and little shrubs too, except in a blazing inferno, AHHHH."*

*Sub note: This is why I'm not in developmental psychology

-Finally the bright spot. I've been learning Perl recently (programming language), so that we can run experiments on the web. It's fun because you get to build things. Here is the first experiment I've ever built. I'm proud of it. It is supposed to give you the impression that it is measuring something profound. (really, that's what it is meant to do).
www.missouri.edu/~gunza/test/start.cgi

-Oh... and addendum: Mike from NYC visited here again... he and his buddy had tickets to college basketball finals in St. Louis. Once AGAIN we had a nice time and good chats, and more importantly, we discovered the vital importance of referring to Columbia Missouri as CoMO. You heard it first here folks.

Revenge of the license gnomes!!!!

2005-03-20T20:15:00.000-08:00

I start with good news. Sock gnomes are a well known phenomenon. Wherever socks are dropped into washing machines, sock gnomes are busy at work pinching one of each pair. That's not the good news, but bear with me. Being as the number of black socks I have is small, I am loathe for it to also become odd. I therefore make time to fight the sock gnomes with safety pins (in the socks you ninny! The pins go in the socks. Aye karmuba).

But it seems that Missouri sock gnomes are a special breed; they play tough but fair. To wit: a few days ago, after emptying a small fortunes worth of quarters into my building's dryer, I returned to find an open safety pin and one unpaired black sock. BUT! In recognition of their having to work so hard to beat me, the gnomes left booty. Specifically, a pair of slinky black women's underwear. Yes, they had transmogrified my sock! (or traded for it, science cannot yet tell which). Unfortunately their new form, while potentially more exciting, wasn't very useful (You try keeping your toes warm with string!), so I left them on the washer for somebody else. But at least I learned that Missouri sock gnomes have a sense of fair play - and that makes the world a better and more virtuous place. Which, as I say, is good news.

I also made another happy discovery, this one to be found in the change rooms of my new gym. It is hot and wet, and not nearly as dirty as you are thinking (naughty person!). I'm talking about the hot tubs here for heavens sake!

Anyway, they have a warm one and a hot one, and I find that after doing weights (or otherwise beating the crap out of your body), you can actually feel your muscles unclench as you switch between them. Bliss. I recomend it muchly. And, even better, if you go really late at night (it's a 24 hour gym), they generally forget about charging you the 50 cent fee for renting towels (if you're like me and too lazy to bring and wash your own).

In travel news, I visited my friend Mike in Manhattan, which was a lot of fun. Good times and good conversation as always ensued (yaay Mike). I also gave another exciting rendition of my thesis talk, but this time at the University of Kansas (VERY pretty campus, BTW). I have a friend who did his grad school there, so he set me up, being as I'm kinda sorta local here. Long story short, I met the smart and interesting folks out there (great program), and they even put me up in a hotel for free. And plus the campus was pretty [sigh].

The Kansas trip, however, did have a hitch. I had planned to rent a car and drive there. I've been driving for something like 12 years now, so this seemed like a natural thing to do. But it turns out that to rent a car here you need a valid drivers license. Jerks!

Now understand that I do have a license, but it's so out-of-State that it's not even from a state. Sadly it seems that if you are here for more than a few months you have to get a Missouri license, otherwise ixnay on the ivingdray. I've already gambled with this a few times by driving friends' cars and praying that I wouldn't get pulled over, but it would definitely have been no dice at a rental place.

I needed to do the test, so spent a few days of total futility making phones in testing offices ring endlessly. Stupid American bureaucracy! Then my friends explained that you don't do that here, you just show up and do the test. In Canada I recall having to book tests 6 to 12 months in advance. Stupid American bureaucracy one, stupid Canadian bureaucracy zero.

I persuaded a very nice friend to drive me in her car to the local exam center, and then, in an extraordinary feat, unrivalled by any but the most hardened of adolescents, I passed! First time! With an almost perfect score.

This latter part was not an accident. Having conferred with friends beforehand I knew that the test here was the opposite of the Canadian one. In Ontario the written part is a joke ("at a stop sign you should: a) stop, b) speed up, c) display a valid license for any sock gnomes in the vehicle, d) not use the hot tubs"). The Ontario driving test, though, is brutal, with an incredibly high fail rate. Here, apparently, the driving part is pretty easy (I got nothing but a 3% deduction for backing up too close to the middle of a road), but the written tests involve specific and detailed knowledge. Highly credentialed people have been known to fail them.

As someone who had cleared better than 20 years of formal education, with racks of variously capitalized letters after my name (6, not including "JerK"), pride does not allow me to fail anything that comes in multiple choice format (with the possible exceptions of algebra and purity tests). I therefore spent a solid night scrutinizing the driver's handbook, and memorizing things like "rear lights have to be bright enough that you can see them 500 feet away" (asked), and "a floppy hat is an excellent accoutrement for pimping" (not asked, but should have been).

Anyway, long story short, I was first in line at the testing office, cut the written test short by getting 20 questions in a row correct, looked through a little window to read signs for a nice desk person (vision test), and was dispatched directly to my friend's car for the driving bit. All in all, I had a new photo license in my hand within 45 minutes of entering the office. I'm told that this all can normally take up to a few hours, but that still kicks Ontario's butt up and down any odd numbered (North-South) or even numbered (East-West) highway you can find with vision-test worthy eyes. See how much useless stuff I know now?

The last piece of news I will impart here is that I officially didn't win the CBC short story contest. It seems that the prizes went instead to published novelists - as the maxim goes: "to those who have shall be given". Ah well, it's probably my fault. I forgot to mention on the application that I am living in a State where concealed firearms are legal. Ah well, next time, Heston willing!

Depressing: movies, holiday, dating life. Not-so-depressing: Gym, SPAM DOGS. Upshot: movie recomendations from an increasingly fit person

2005-02-18T17:28:00.000-08:00

So first off... go see Hotel Rwanda. Take your friends, take your acquaintances, take random people off the street. Holy shit, it's amazing, and if Don Cheadle doesn't win best actor at the Oscars it is only because not enough people went out and saw this film. I haven't seen many of the competing actors, but they just can't have been better.

It also rather puts your life in perspective. For example, I should probably be whining here about how Valentine's day is approaching and I will once again be bitter and single (went out for a while with Un-Texas girl, but recently she has run into some personal issues - there's no bad blood between us, we're still on excellent terms... they're just excellent SINGLE terms now). But... really... Y'know what, I'm just going to have to come back and write more of this later. It's hard to find stuff to make fun of when you're just thinking "wow, nobody is coming to kill me! And if they did, other people would be professionaly obliged to stop them. I'm so lucky." If this sounds like a wacky exaggeration to you, it is because you haven't seen the film yet. Go watch it.

Now... One of the drawbacks to being a Post Doc, is that I don't get in to the student gym for free any more. I have to pay now. On the upside, being a post doc pays well... or at least, better than being a grad student (side note: if you want to be as happy as a clam, the key lies with choosing the right comparisons. Of course, to be as happy as a clam is also to put yourself on a par with brainless, virtually immobile invertibrate, frequently eaten by obnoxious tourists at seaside resorts. Think about it, you're way better off than a clam! There, don't you feel better already? QED).

So anyway, Mizzou just finished building a brand sparklingly new gym that is so exceptionally nice that it would be foolish not to use. There is also a commercial one that is so much closer to my house that it would be foolish not to use. Fortunately I've had years of experience at the whole fool thing. After a little mulling I signed a year long contract with the 24 hour commercial one. Upshot?
Pro: Signing a long term contract makes me feel all growed up and mature.
Con: I don't know if I can sustain this illusion for a whole year. For me, 'mature' and 'manure' don't just rhyme. But! I do expect a big pay off from the gym, to be delivered in regular instalments of rippling muscle, stiff shoulders, and joints that crackle like a firing squad every time I stand up.

While I was buying my membership, though, I did manage to totally disconcert a crack sales representative. This guy was apparently a top salesman for Xerox before dropping out the corporate life to slow down and hang about in gyms. What he didn't know was that I had already scoped things out and made my decisions before I walked in the door. Clearly this doesn't happen much, because in mid-sell, as I acquiesced point after point, he suddenly came over with a wave of uncertainty, paused, knitted his brows and asked "are you always this relaxed?"
"Uh huh."

On a professional front I gave my first brownbag to the social psych division here in Columbia. For the pitifully ignorant few of you not conversant with academia (lucky bastards), a brownbag is a semi-formal presentation of research, in which some poor (usually) student talks for 45 minutes or so while everyone else watches, asks questions, and potentially eat their lunches, potentially out of brown paper bags. Hence the name. That said, I've never physically seen a brown paper bag in any of these. Ever. I've seen Tupperware, I've seen clear plastic bags, I've seen (in one very special professor's case) a lunch box, but never the eponymous bag. Perhaps in recognition of this, the folks here have renamed theirs to "SPAM DOG". Why "SPAM DOG," you ask? Some sincere mid-western appreciation for processed meat? A misguided belief that any given word from a Monty Python skit makes your seminars funny?

Sadly no. They used to hold their SPAM DOG at 4pm on Fridays, and then go drinking afterwards. They therefore concocted the acronym "Social Psychology Area Meating (my spelling, not theirs), Delay of Gratification". Unfortunately, these days too many faculty have kids that need picking up from school on Fridays afternoons, so it got moved earlier in the day. Voila, no more gratification, just a room full of people suffering through slides about my thesis - said thesis, my inner marketer would like you to know, now not available in bookstores anywhere!

Future plans: I'm going to rent a car and give another performance of my thesis talk at the University of Kansas next week. This should be cool as I'm told Lawrence Kansas is even nicer than Columbia. Also, some time in March I'm going to head out and visit my buddy Mike in Manhattan (hey, whaddaya want? You can't go to Lawrence every week).

Oh... update on the valentines day thing (yes, this entry written over several days). I ended up going out that night to do some sad-bastard-single-guy-drinking with a buddy. After a few drinks we went to this place for food, and discovered that they had table cloths down and candles on the tables. So there we were, the two of us having our private candle lit dinner on Valentines day, slowly realizing that to the rest of the room we were now officially gay. I think this notion was more alarming to him than to me though, because he really is gay, and so would have a harder time explaining it away to anyone who wasn't supposed to know.

over and out
Cheers
alex

If God had wanted this entry to have a title, he'd of given me a little box to write it in to.

2005-01-31T22:52:00.000-08:00

Sorry, this entry is a little bit long too. Don't blame me, I actually cut stuff out already to shorten it. Anyway, here goes:

I got a very exciting magazine in the mail. It's the "Blackhawk product group catalogue", and it wants to sell me outfits to kill people in. Also it sells numerous pouches, belts, packs, "dynamic entry" devices (for hacking up doors), and had a multi page advert for the Gladius. The Gladius is for "Night-Ops", and is an "innovative handheld tactical illumination tool... designed primarily for handheld use... to be immersed into the realities of close quarter conflict and should significantly enhance the capabilities of those operating in low light environments." The Gladius has a lot of exciting features such as "an excellent center of gravity" and "a patent pending multifunction tail cap."

If you look at the picture, it becomes apparent that the Gladius is, in fact, a flashlight. Except, like, it will like totally help you flip out and kill people man! In night-ops!

Seriously, these guys are great. They also sell a "tactical caffeine transfer unit," which is a coffee mug, except it "can also double as a bludgeon in an emergency." Maybe later when I've climbed back onto my chair I'll tell you about their travel mug version, which has a tapered bottom "to stay secure in the cup holder of your vehicle." Because, you know, when you're driving your Ford Focus on a classified mission through a tactical supermarket parking lot environment, you wouldn't want to get a stain on your pants.

So! News! I went to this conference in New Orleans (aka "N'orlans"). It was a lot of fun, and I went into my usual conference social butterfly mode. The conference experience is changing for me, in part because I know a lot more people now, and in part because I'm getting more efficient at parsing posters quickly for interest /content. Posters are useful and social things. Useful, because presenting them is how most students persuade their schools to pay for their trips, and social because poster sessions are about the only time you get everybody all in the same room. After a few conferences and doing a summer school gig, the game becomes "can I walk down an aisle without meeting at least one person I know". In a crowded session it is a hard game.

I had a poster of my own up though. It was scheduled for 5:30 pm on the very last day, so it didn't attract an overkill number of bystanders. But it did get a few big names stopping by (none of whom anyone outside of social psychology will have heard of, but such is the nature of the beast). One of these luminaries decided that there was some German guy who was working in a similar vein and actually ran off to fetch him. Very flattering for a poor little post doc. It made me happy.

But here I am writing about New Orleans, and it is all boring conference talk. "What about Mardi Gras," You ask? "What about public drinking and vaguely indecent acts?

Well... The first Mardi Gras parade of the year was on the last night we were there, but... um... I missed it by about half an hour. But to compensate I did go on an extensive program of all the other sorts of things you're supposed to do in “N'orlans.” By popular cannon, this consists of meandering around the french quarter, going to Cafe du Monde, drinking 'hurricanes', and going on a ghost tour. I did them all. They were (in order): pretty cool, ok, highly alcoholic, and ok.

Bourbon street runs through the middle of the french quarter, and features lots of semi-old stuff, curlicued wrought iron, two storied buildings with balconies, and shops with cheap stuff for tourists. Much of it is quite pretty to look at, and expensive to eat at (quality not necessarily corresponding well with price). It also has a frat-like party each night, with crowds milling about, drink in hand, throwing beads at each other. Before my arrival I was lead to believe that this was a social exchange thing, where person A would do something lascivious involving nudity, and person B would in return give them beads. It was exactly like that except for the lasciviousness and the exchange. It was definitely social though. There was cheering, drinking, and strings of beads being pitched with indiscriminate alacrity, mostly from balconies. Any time you passed a knot of people there was considerable danger of getting beamed in the head - It was all fun and games, and who ever got slowed down by losing an eye?

Actually I did see one incident of boobs being flashed, but... well, at the risk of being beautyist, they weren't exactly the sort one wants to see. Which is kind of sad really, because here was this ignobly endowed person, soldiering bravely on with the script, trying to get tacky and inexpensive jewellery for free. We're talking shiny plastic that would pretty much have been thrown at them anyway. Ah well, so long as they got an elicit thrill from it.

There was also a dress-up masquerade party on the last night, but there's really not much to write about there. Other than it turns out that masks aren't very practical for partying, restricting vision and ventilation as they do. Most people partied with mask peeled firmly up away from their face.

In local news: I know that many of you stay up nights worrying that the Missouri legislature may sit idle, squandering tax payer’s good money on nothing. Fear ye not! For this is a state where legislators have sat cheek by jowl, hour by hour, painstakingly hammering out massive compendia of Official Stuff. Yes, Stuff. There is an official state bird (bluebird), state animal (Missouri mule), insect (honey bee), flower (White hawthorn), tree (flowering dogwood), and nut tree (yes, a state nut tree - the Eastern black walnut). Also, the state fish is the paddlefish. Sorry, the channel catfish. The paddlefish is the state aquatic animal, silly!

The scope of my imagination is humbled by these people. But lest you think I'm selling my imagination short, the official state fossil is the Crinoid, and the state mineral is Galena - not to be confused with Mozarkite, the state rock. The square dance is the state folk dance. No word if there's a state non-folk dance, but I lobby for moshing. Or the funky chicken. That would make for excellent license plate slogans.

Good people, yes, this is the energy, dynamism, and anal-retentive attention to detail that has made Missouri the great... rural backwater*... that it is today!
(*except St. Louis).

I worry, though, about how American school children can be expected to know all this stuff. That's l4 different bits of information (including the state instrument (fiddle), and slogan (sceptically enough, the "show me state")). Multiply that by 50 states and you can see how a teacher would be tempted to defer multiplication to the 12th grade. There's only so many times a North Carolina elementary school teacher can hear little Johnny confuse South Dakota's aquatic animal with Delaware's folk dance before she gives up and longs for a place that doesn't require metal detectors for entry.

But anyway, you'll be happy to know that the legislators didn't spend ALL their time working out the official state bug-that-people-think-is-crawling-under-their-skin-when-they're-on-acid. Oh no, they also made an official flag. I think that they might have been angry with the official flag makers union at the time though.

Think of it like this: It's exactly like the French flag (This makes sense as Missouri was part of the Louisiana Purchase from France - if you say it the French way it sounds even more like "misery," so if I were France, I would totally have sold it too), except sideways and with three concentric circles in the middle. The outer circle has 24 white stars (the number of states when MO joined the union). The next one has two grizzly bears holding a shield with leaves and a knight’s helmet on it. Oh yes, and there are another 24 stars over the helmet, and a ribbon underneath with the state latin slogan, "salus populi supreme lex esta" ("let the welfare of the people be the supreme law").
The innermost circle is the shield held by the bears, and it's easy! It just has an eagle holding an olive branch and arrows, a crescent moon, another grizzly bear, and a ribbon wrapped around the edge with the state's ENGLISH slogan, "united we stand, divided we fall". This slogan narrowly beat out their second choice: "Screw those uppity St. Louis jerks."
I can't really decide how to interpret this flag though. Were the state founders pack rats, or were they just so darn nice that they couldn't bring themselves to leave anyone's ideas out?

"How 'bout a big ol' bear!"
"Jed, we've already got two. We put grizzlies!"
"Well I want me one o' them alsa!"
"Weeell… How ‘bout a brown bear then?"
"No way! If they got grizzlies..."
"Oh geez. Can ya get that in Lou? And see if ya cain't squeeze 'nother rack o' stars on in while yer at 'er. Now what about a french slogan? Don't nobobody round here know none o' that?"

I will give them this though... a maple leaf and two stripes, they sure as heck showed us!

Oh can-ah-daaah.

over and out.

Christmas (from the back end) (Christmas's back end, not mine...) (oh for heavens sake grow up) (ya so, sue me) (um, hohoho, just kidding Americans!)

2005-01-13T22:16:00.000-08:00

2005 has officially arrived, and in a major affront to futurists everywhere did so without galactic peace. Or galactic war. Not even a light galactic dust up that turned out to be a misunderstanding. Motorists planet wide drove around Jan 1st 2005, cars firmly attached to the ground as an entire century of prognosticators spun in their (still earthbound) graves. But to them, all, I will say "thanks for trying". I'll even post it up here in the electronic forum that they didn't see coming. I'm that sort of humanitarian.
It is for exactly these sorts of reasons that I rarely make predictions (other than ones like: "Jan 1 2005, I shall be at a party". Futurists: zero, Alex: bragging rights (which he will now spend bragging quite obnoxiously about how well he did in twister at this party. Ah, sweet sweet hubris)). On the other hand we're talking about the same Alex here, who this very morning, in between reading a journal and being brain dead, absently selected a jug out of the fridge and poured orange juice all over his cereal. Yeah. But it turns out that if you strain the orange juice off and replace it with milk the upshot actually tastes pretty good (cornflakes and grape nuts for those willing to try this at home). Ah, sweet sweet serendipity.

Ok, so I had a very nice time in Toronto, had an early birthday dinner (by about 3 days) with my family, then got on a plane and flew home. It ends up being about a 12 hour trip when you include all the flying, waiting in airports and driving to and from at the respective ends. And only once did I commit the grievous offence of being hungry in an airport (if you break down and ask for food there are heavy fines - they know you can't get lunch anywhere else, so they put you over the figurative barrel and do things to your back end that are illegal in many states when done non-figuratively. Seriously, I once ordered a hot dog in an airport, and got all of the fixings on it in order to boost its meagre nutritive value high enough to hold me through - I ended up with a mountain of veggies on a bun with a shred of meat at the bottom, and then they charged me extra for the sauerkraut anyway).

But all that travelling was worth it, because when I arrived back in Columbia there were very nice dinners with people I hadn't seen in a while, obligatory attempts at getting experiments designed at school, and birthday parties. Two of them, as it happened. The de rigueur method of birthday parting here seems to involve going out for a dinner, and then retreating to somebody's house to play games afterwards. I know it's de rigueur because it happened both times, and both times there was only a reasonably brief period of staring at each other over dessert saying "ok, what now? I dunno, what do you want to do?")
So anyway, the first party was mine. At the house afterwards we played this game called "scene it", in the course of which my team was soundly thrashed. Twice. So then we played trivial pursuit, which was much better, because we only lost badly at that one.

The second party was this witty lad Aaron's. At his, we ended up playing this very sophisticated drinking game involving cards and many complicated rules. You wouldn't have thought that complicated rules and drinking went well together, but this is America, builder of a world empire! And American beer doesn't have much alcohol in it (pick your attribution). Anyway, at one point in this game we had to go around the circle providing novel rhymes for the word "frog" until someone came up dry, at which point they were obligated to drink. The second time this came to me I gave the word "slog", which everyone knows means "toiling". As in "look a' tha' poor bastar' sloggin' up th' 'ill thar". But apparently this is an English word, or so I gather by the number of people (i.e. everybody) accusing me of having made it up on the spot. Stupid Americans. Ah well. A few cards later I got one that meant everyone had to go around naming things from a category of my choosing. I chose "Canadian provinces." That showed 'em (actually they did pretty well till someone said "Vancouver"). Incidentally this word problem isn't just an American thing. I spent my new years at a party full of Canadian Waterloo math nerds. There I discovered that nobody understood my definition of "cot". On this continent it is apparently not something you put babies to sleep in. I spent a lot of time in a cot as a baby so I thought I was an authority on the matter, but this argument didn't seem to be persuasive. Here they think 'cot' means "travel bed". I shall say no more about games other than to note that I ended the evening on a winning note, playing charades. This game was clinched by a tie breaker in which I successfully conveyed the movie "Mighty ducks" by skating up and down the living room carpet (with very authentic skating movements I might add) and flapping my arms. And to think some consider grad school easy! Ha!

But "ah," you say, "there you go bragging again. Surely you have more self-effacing stories to balance this out?" Well, um, hahaha, me, embarassing? Gosh no... Well, um... Ok, you know how they put signs on floors saying "slippery when wet"? Well it turns out that they are also slippery when the bottom of your shoes are wet. It's true, I researched it myself! "Surely you can't be serious." You exclaim (apparently you watched the movie 'Airplane' too many times and have become fixated on the word "surely"). And then after I look at my feet and laugh nervously you giggle and add: "Surely not!"

To this I can say only one thing: "I am serious. And don't call me Shirley". Never let it be said that I don't pander to a crowd.
Well anyway, I didn't do very well in physics, but I do have an official bachelors of "science" degree under the belt (PhD's aren't science, they're "philosophy doctorates"... hence the initials), so in this spirit of controlled empirical observation, here is the protocol I used: First, find a large birdbath with an ellipsoid disk of ice floating in it (see fig. 1 - historical note: this figure is accurate in all details other than the appropriate weather, because it was actually taken weeks BEFORE the experiment in question was conducted). Now poke at the ice playfully with a finger, thus making water slop over the edges (for extra credit you can also splash it onto your pants, for that faux-incontinent look). Now that your shoes are good and wet, find a fairly smooth and nearby bit of ground and... well, jump on it. I found it helps to use a playful bouncy jump, but if that doesn't work, just grit your teeth and think of insurance money. You shouldn't have to think for long though, because if you do it right your feet will launch themselves violently outwards, like hot women away from a physicist (stupid physics). The overall effect is like break dancing, except more comic, resulting in sorer palms, and without all that graceful bouncing up again afterwards.

See, isn't science great? Now if you want to make the experience really authentic you should spend a year working on it, then spend another six months writing it up just so. Then you should send your new manuscript to a friend who can play "editor" (i.e. sit on it for 6 months, go out for a lot of lunches, then send it back with a short note saying "do more"). This process can be repeated indefinitely, which is incidentally why scientists are stereotyped as grey-haired. It takes that long before their stuff gets published, and they can leave the lab to mingle with the rest of society - which they then do in a vaguely condescending fashion. This attitude, incidentally, is exactly why society pressures editors so hard to keep all the scientists tied up, rewriting harmlessly away in their labs.

Oh yes, and today as I was walking through the main quadrangle (past the enormous freestanding pillars) I noticed two guys standing in the snow and puddles, throwing a frisbee back and forth. I went and joined them for a while, which was nice. And if the disk occasionally bounced out of my open hands it was definitely because the weather was chilly and my fingers were cold, and not at all because I was rusty. Definitely.

Okay, that's more than enough from me now eh.

Oh, ps. I got my very first issue of the Atlantic Monthly yesterday and it’s very good, but more importantly it had this headline: “An Exquisite Slogger: What to read this month” by Benjamin Schwarz. English word my foot! They just weren’t educationalamizated enough to know it. Even M.S. word here doesn’t think that ‘slog’ is a spelling mistake. So there you have it, the Microsoft seal of approval. Um. So. Right, yeah. Nevermind.

Christmas (from the front end)

2004-12-22T14:40:00.000-08:00

So it's just a few days before christmas, and I'm still keeping up with this blog. How's that for devotion, eh! Yes, I know, I'm only doing it every 2 weeks anyway, but... Well I know that might not seem like a lot of effort to you, but... but... Yes I do proof read these things as a matter of fact. Several times... Bu... Yes well, literacy shmiteracy! Shove it!
Ah, christmas.

So anyway, a week or two back, I was walking through campus (having succesfully persuaded the admin to not pay me for those days in septemtber before I arrived in the States. Brilliant move. Will save a bunch in taxes), when, pausing only for a lengthy parenthesis, I heard a thumping sound in the distance. To be more specific, a *rhythmic* thumping sound. Closer investigation revealed marching-band type drummers drumming merilly away, minus the daft clothes (plus normal civvie ones - this is America, they don't approve of nudity. Except on tv. (just kidding, they're straight laced about it there too)), and minus the rest of the band. Just the drum people. I was later informed that this is known as a drum line. Anyway, the point is that they were incredibly impressive. They had five bass drums, all tuned differently so they could ripple up and down tunefully, the rhythems were complex but driving, and they had an awful lot of rimshots worked in to fire things up. Also, their cymbal players had this cool move where they'd jam their cymbals together and hold them so they wouldn't just clang, but reverberate percusively against each other... It's a haunting shimering effect. I am, generaly speaking, an indifferent fan of drum and marching band type music, but I couldn't help standing for nearly half an hour just watching these guys practice. Really fantastic stuff.

So lets see, big picture stuff. Life in Missouri is generally rolling along quite well. I flew into Toronto on the 15th. This involved taking a shuttle to St. Louis airport, which put me in the presence of an old man who accosted me, ostensibly for a crossword clue. First, though, he remenisced about riding his horse and buggy in the 30's through the field where some large institutional looking building now stands (so if you do the math, you can readily deduce that he must be at least... um, old). Then, as I settled into a newspaper, he waved a crossword and asked for a 4 letter word for "Georgian rose". Or at least, incoherent muttering added up to this question. But I gave it an earnest effort, before falling back to the loud public rationalization that I was Canadian, and not supposed to know about these things. He and his wife laughed, and he said "I thought you looked like a Phi Beta Kappa." This took me aback. Was this some smart newspaper reading fraternity?... then it dawned on me that HE must be a member, and that this was their secret way of identifying other PBK's in public (If you use the english alphabet letters, it sounds pleasingly like something that environmentalists worry will get into the water supply). So anyway, I got to the airport, admired the F-18 fighter planes mingling in with the jumbo jets (the local airforce apparently being too cheap to get their own runway), did a bunch of flying, landed in Toronto, took a shuttle to Waterloo, and had a beer in my hand within 2 hours of crossing the border. Hey, it's the good life. So then I spent time catching up with various good friends, which is nice for me, but rather dull for you to hear about. I did take a trip to London though, which had the personal hilight of accompanying Chris and Heather (the newly-ish weds) to visit Dunkey Boy TM (aka Dr. Dunc), but which had the more generic benefit of producing the following bit of blog-worthy description: My complete memory of the bus ride back to Toronto is as follows: 1) Climb on bus, 2) See London, 3) close eyes, 4) open eyes, 5) see Toronto, 6) get off bus, 7) say "wow, that was quick", 8) become aware that I'm talking to myself in public and shuffle off quickly, trying not to mutter. See, wasn't that worth hearing about now? (shut up).

Fast forward to yestarday. What a strangely time warped sentence that last one is. Ha, now that second sentence sends (note the sibilant aliteration) me on a little diversion: I was sitting in a Waterloo friend's house last week (Chris's), and saw Jason's bottle of Pimm's (a bizarre English liquor) sitting on a table. "Pimm's," I said, "What a strange word. It starts off strong, then suddenly and inexplicably disbands." To which Chris replied "You think about words a lot." He apparently doesn't. Yeah, I know, what a Pimm.

So anyway, yestarday I went downtown to meet my crazy cool anarchist friend. We were walking through Kensington Market (Note to non-Torontonians: little windy streets with stalls spilling out, producing a pleasantly cluttered feel), when we got passed by a midwinter solstice parade. There is a scale that parades can be ranked on. It is a scale that has military precision and serial arrays of stupid marching band uniforms on the one end, and this parade more or less at the other. It wouldn't be fair to say it was completely anarchic (everyone was ambling in pretty much the same direction), or that it lacked bands (a few gaggles were attempting easy-going assaults on instruments with varying degrees of skill), or even a theme. But this was a parade that an anthropologist could really sink her teeth into. There were all sorts of masks, and large but mobile totem-like constructions (fishes, stylized faces, suns, ravens, non-specific birds, etc). There was papier mache, there was painted fabric which billowed plenty, and had good ragged fringes around the edges. These were people who took their fringishness seriously. There were even some drummers. They lacked the artful precision and jaw-dropping synchrony of the Missouri drum line, but they were clearly having a good time doing it, and in all fairness held a pretty good beat. There were even people on the second floors of buildings along the parade route who had set up costumed and heavily papier-mache'd displays of their own ("paper and mud theatre", as my friend termed it).

After the parade, we met with the crazy-cool-anarchist's inner circle of friends for inexpensive Pad Thai. This included a certain amount of grumbling that this solstice parade was just too big now and wasn't fun anymore. They actually had a police cruiser at the front of it and everything. I'd guess that there were maybe 500 people, although a great many of them were just regular folks marching along. Albeit folks with a highly developed propensity for wool hats (it was quite warm - right around freezing, which felt positively tropical after the -15 and -22 celcius of the previous two days... which, with a nasty icy wind to boot, is considered "freaking cold" in Toronto (or as Edmontontonians would say "a scorcher of a heat wave")). Anyway, the anarchists were really very nice and a witty merry time was had all around.

Afterwards we collectively went to a Queen Street bar with very cool atmospherics (the "Cameron House"), and saw a very excellent band ("run with the kittens"). They're a small time band for the now, but they're beginning to get bigger gigs, and I wouldn't be surprised if they went places. They had entertaining songs, knew their way around their instruments, and kept up a steady flow of banter. I would watch out for them on MTV, except that this would involve watching MTV (not to mention that MTV apparently stopped playing actual music videos years ago).

As for today, it turns out that a local arena (well, a flooded tenis court with hockey boards around the edges) has pick up hockey in the mornings. I went, and it was fun. There was no contact allowed, so there wasn't much you could do about the 14 year olds skating circles around you, but frankly there was only one goalie (he took turns playing for each of the very loosely organized 'teams'), so it wasn't exactly a competitive atmosphere. There was quite a lot of variance in skill (from my level, on up), but it was all very convivial, and at least all this skating practice meant I wasn't COMPLETELY lost to the flow of things. This was gratifying. The only real problem was the puck. Frankly, I have the stick handling skills of a concussed four year old. That said, I did score a goal! It is entirely irrelevant to the monumental achievement of the thing that it went into an empty net, on my third swipe, from a distance of approximately two feet, after receiving a nice soft pass with basically no defensive coverage on me. Ah well, nothing that a bit of practice couldn't fix! And maybe a body transplant.

So! That leaves me here, trying to work up the energy to leave the house and go finish up my Christmas shopping. I even think I have a clue for what to get (you are required to be impressed by this: I'm a boy).

But goodness this is a long entry. And here I thought there would be nothing to write about! (shut up).

alex

Thanksgiven

2004-12-06T19:26:00.000-08:00

So I baby sat Ziggy the 3 month old kitten for four days over Thanksgiving. Ziggy is of a breed (the some-county-in-England-that-I-forget rex) that is supposed to be hypoallergenic. Except that nobody told Ziggy this, because he makes me sniffle way more than any cats at home. I had to go out and get drugs to cope. On the plus side though he was a big suck, and would curl up on you for hours to sleep (he also liked shoulders - is this some weird Missouri cat thing?).
An interesting quirk of this breed is that they take a year or two to grow fur. Ziggy essentially has full body stubble. I'm sure there are uses for this (razor commercials, neo-nazi mascots, etc), but most have the unfortunate requirement of his sitting still long enough to take pictures. Kittens, you see, are binary creatures. They have two modes: Comatose and berserk. All that artfully posed feline cuteness? Grown up cat stuff.
Anyway, on the day before Thanksgiving (Wednesday - they don't bother making it a long weekend here), it snowed and snowed in huge drifting pretty flakes. So much so that a bunch of it stuck to the ground. It only lasted a day or two, but that morning I curled up on the couch with Ziggy the kitty and watched The Big Chill on video. Then I went out, got my antihistamines, a battery for my camera, took a roll of pictures, then came back and couldn't find Ziggy. Long story short, I tore my apartment to pieces looking for him, and became increasingly convinced that there was nowhere left to hide, and that he must be freezing his stubbly posterior to death outside. Only problem was that I couldn't find him outside either. I was 20 minutes into composing a speech that started "Sorry, I'm a loser kitten-sitter, and deserve the horrible death you are about to inflict" when guess who appears out of nowhere... Maybe he was mad at me for abandoning him, or maybe he was asleep in some massively improbable place, I don't know. Crazy little bastard (but otherwise lovable).

So I abandoned Ziggy for much of Thanksgiving day proper to experience a genuine American thanksgiving. I had a nice lunch dinner with one set of friends (not at a farm as advertised, but pleasant nonetheless), and a dinner dinner at my advisor's house with some other social faculty and associated family. There were probably 20 people crowded around one big table. It was a very jovial affair, and as per tradition, thanks were formally given - in this case for friends, for company, and for a certain bird that made the ultimate sacrifice.
True fact: There's a White House tradition where the president pardons a turkey every year. It's this big production because they have to train the turkey to be close to people, and they have a backup turkey in case something happens to the first one. I don't know what happens to unpardoned backup turkeys though. Presumably sausage stuffing.

Anyway, Ziggy eventually went home and I didn't see him until his mommy hosted a candle party. At this party he was quite berserk (awake), and pretended not to recognize me until almost everyone else had gone home. Then he curled up on my knee and went to sleep. Anyway, candle parties... It was one of those home-party-sales things where you have a gathering ("party") in which victims ("customers") are mercilessly plied with cocktails, each other's banter, and information about some product. The latter is supplied by some friend of a friend who is attempting to make a bit of supplemental income by selling whatever the product is (these are Americans, they use the word "product" right in front of "customers". As in "There's more product in the other catalogue", or "Isn't it good product" or "put the candle down and back away slowly before I ram product up your nose"). It was a fun psychology crowd though, so things went quite nicely. Once again, long story short: I didn't buy any candles, but I did learn that you have to keep their wicks trimmed, and that you can lustre up a candle by rubbing it with panty hoes. Apparently the candle industry enjoys a good double entendre. I only hope that one day they will find one.

In other news I took a repeat trip down to Jefferson city to go skating. This was my second venture on ice this side of the border (assuming you don't count the one on my bike in which I slid gracefully on black ice into some not-very-graceful tarmac). This time I went with Un-Texas girl. Frankly, she was preternaturally good at it for someone who had never before seen an ice surface that didn't fit comfortably into a glass (with room to spare for iced tea). On the other hand, unlike my ex-girlfriend from Michigan, she was quite impressed that I could skate backwards. Really, women from warm climates - why didn't I think of this years ago?

Speaking of warm climates, today (Dec 6) it was about 10 Celsius out. So I made the 5 min walk between the office and the gym in shorts and t shirt, had a good solid workout (something sorely neglected recently), and came out, slightly sore, to discover good solid Missouri rain barrelling down. That was 20 minutes ago. So now here I am, holed up and hungry in my office, waiting for the wetness to abate. More than one shower a day really is just overkill.

Ah, who am I kidding, I need to stop writing this crap and just bike home in the rain. [sigh]. Foooood.

Oh, BTW, I saw the movie "sideways" yestarday. Really quite good. Not elite super amazing good, but definitely worth getting out to see.

cheers
alex

The Purfect holiday

2004-11-21T22:33:00.000-08:00

So it is now Thanksgiving season in the USA. The university here gets a WHOLE WEEK off for this. In Canada I don't think we get a whole week off for anything other than Christmas and perhaps spinal chord injuries. Well, summers and gaps between terms maybe. The Canadian thanksgiving already slid by a month or two ago, in its accustomed relative obscurity. Here in the US everyone leaps on planes at Thanksgiving and flies across the country to be with their 'nucular' family, put major dents in the world's turkey population, then kiss everyone good bye and fly back to school again. Three weeks later it's Christmas and they again jump on planes to do the exact same thing all over - except maybe this time taking longer to browse the papers for news of airline CEO's ascending to heaven, and the extirpation of turkeys (extirpations being local extinctions - I learned this word off the Crocodile Hunter show - who ways tv isn't edumacationalizing?). I'm absolutely serious: There are 12 months in a year, and it seems that in the USA, the two of them on which it is absolutely mandatory to move heaven and earth to get across the continent home again are consecutive. I think each January is filled with the sighs of tens of millions of Americans realizing that it will be another 11 months before they have to hazard the airport gauntlet to see their family again. I look forward to witnessing this phenomenon in person.

So anyway, that leaves me all alone pretty much in a ghost town for a week. Well not QUITE alone, for 3 reasons.

1) not EVERYBODY leaves. Just almost everybody. Including UnTexas girl who I am currently spending much too much time with (she's home in Texas with the 'rents). Let's say that just enough people stay to make looting impractical.

2) I think I have an invite to head out to somebody’s farm and have a Thanksgiving dinner. This is one of the crazy people I went on that bike ride with. Speaking of which, there are pictures online! Check them out at
www.midmobrr.com and click on the photos link. Or for the impatient, go directly there at:
http://www.triathletepro.com/midmobrr/pict/fallphotos/FallBrrRide2004/index.html
For evidence that I went, see pic 24 (http://www.triathletepro.com/midmobrr/pict/fallphotos/FallBrrRide2004/P1010099.html), and pic 29 (find it yourself. They're numbered). For the candy-box bike I was talking about, see a whole bunch of the pics, starting with number 2. And yes, that is a real carved pumpkin that people are wearing on their heads. Also see the Barbie cart being dragged out of the river (photo 8) while we all watch from the bridge (photo 9), and being towed (photo 11), ridden (14), and packed off home (31). For Missouri scenery see many of them.

3) My friend Alison here is getting a new Kitten, and it arrives right exactly before she leaves to go home to Arizona for 4 days (crazy Americans! Did I not tell you?). So guess who gets to kitty-sit it for all that time?!? Alright! I think we're technically not allowed to have pets in this building, but for 4 days in which no actual Americans are in town, who's going to know? Hee hee hee.

On a related note, Columbia seems relatively cat-full. I went out for a walk through the local suburbia 2 nights ago, and I ran into 3 cats, one of whom insisted on climbing onto my shoulders and lying there with back legs straddled over one shoulder (most ungainly), and head lying on the other (unbearably cute). I also saw a deer running through the streets. It was quite enormous - maybe 5 feet high. And what it lacked in size, compared to, say, a moose, it made up for in raw prancing-around-ness. Very nifty. I talked to a guy waiting to do an experiment in our lab, and he said that this time of year you see them more. Normally they are very territorial and stick close to home, but in mating season they run around further than normal, looking for as much hot all-deer action as they can find. How did he know this? Apparently he took a course in high school on deer hunting. It was technically labelled something like "wild life management", but the tests were on things like "where would you aim on the deer". So there you go, that was my run in with a real mid-Missourian local pre-med student.

Okay, plenty enough writing from me now. Hopefully I will get out soon and spend an afternoon taking pictures of Missouri to send out to you all (well, anyone reading this on my normal mailing lists - and I do mean both of you). I know, I've been putting that off way too long. The once or twice I was really set to go out and do it, the weather was all overcast. Hey, it happens here sometimes.

Anyway, I'm off now to catch some movie at the rag tag (local repertory movie theatre). Fun fun fun.

Actually I just got back from seeing the film. I am able to tell you this, by the incredible modern miracle of internet-sites-not-working-and-letting-your-post-go-up-till-you-get-backness. Truly astounding. But I'm not going to tell you about the movie (it was ok), or the game of Simpsons Road Rage I subsequently played (See! My life isn't TOTALLY geeky... shuddup). No, what I want to tell you is this: As I was jogging my way up Broadway I ran smack dab into this parade! Yep, all the local luminaries were driving along, chucking handfuls of candy at the mobs out their windows. This sounds like it should be a good thing, but the reality is something you should keep veterans away from if they are prone to flashbacks. One minute you are innocently standing there, admiring an enormous tractor with a sign on the side saying "one of my favourite things", the next there is this clatter of tiny hard bouncing things at your feet, and small happy children screaming like the wail of RPG’s between tree trunks in a deep dense jungle, as shells burst over your fox hole and... COVER COVER COVER!!!

So um... yeah. [cough cough]. There was even a car with Miss Columbia in it, and her clone, Miss Teen Columbia. I swear they were identical. Someone clearly spent hours filing the moulding marks from their cheeks, and then carefully dusting over with rouge. Both seemed to have made an effort to wrap the corners of their mouths over top of their ears, and then used some form of plastic spray to hold their faces immobile like that. It was eerie. I really hope for their sakes that these Miss Place gigs pay well, or at the very least that they come with a long line of people offering particularly lewd sexual services, or some such.

They also had lots of marching bands. It is truly astounding that in a place as fashion conscious as the US of A, you can still convince large numbers of hormone crazed teenagers to don fopped-up versions of 200-year-out-of-date military garb, and then voluntarily walk around in public. Even the modern American navy has outfits that are only about 50 years behind the times! See, if I were made president and I happened to be a right wing nut job (not that such a person would ever achieve a position of power in this enlightened country, ah ha ha ha), my idea of humiliating federal prisoners would be to dress them up like this, in huge hats with poofy feathers and four-foot-wide gold-braided shirts with tassels on the shoulders, and parade them up and down Broadway to be mocked by the local populace. But no. Give them instruments and acne, and all of a sudden this is seen as a desirable thing [sigh]. Crazy Americans.

Okay, enough, I'm going to bed. See you all in another 2 weeks or so (seems to be a regular gig now doesn't it).

Cheers
alex

Irradiated man! Now with extra convenience!

2004-11-13T20:18:00.000-08:00

I am writing this from home! This is exciting because I've been without internet at home for about the past 3 weeks. We had to cancel our previous cable access account (it didn't do things it was supposed to, such as working consistently, etc). But now I have a brand new DSL modem plugged in, and the wireless router relocated to under my bed. It just works out from the location of various sockets that it has to go there. So that means I'll get irradiated now as I sleep. How's that for convenience!

So on Thursday I went to see Don Giovanni. A local opera company put it on. The music is very pretty, but to an audience adjusted to modern movie type entertainment the drama tends to be a bit lacking. The first half of it is actually quite a lot of fun, detailing the playa exploits of Don "smoove wiv da ladiez" Giovanni, but the second half just goes on and on about people trying to track down proof that he's messing about, and exploring the axiom that the emotional expression for anxiety should look exactly the same as the ones for wistfulness, suspicion, sadness, and boredom. Three hours is a freaking long movie, and it makes for a VERY long opera when the action starts getting so slow. Of course it didn't help that there was a narcoleptic projectionist who would stop broadcasting the English translations occasionally so you'd have NO idea what was happening. On the other hand, if you're going to spend 3 hours getting a sore bum, you really couldn't ask for nicer music to do it to.

In other news... I write these short stories occasionally. I've now sent one off for some CBC short story contest. Very exciting. Question: Will I win? Answer: Of course. Whether the judges will figure this out and give me the prize money I don't know, but only a lesser mind would see this as a reason to delay having a celebratory party. I've also written my first complete new one in quite some time, so I'll have to send it out to my literary guinea pigs, and see if they email rotten vegetation back at me. It's actually somewhat anxiety provoking sending these things out, because most of the time you're not sure if they're any good till you get that feedback.

I've also... yes, I'll say it... I've also been hanging out a whole bunch recently with this girl that I met at the Halloween party. Yes, a girl! (Well, she likes playing video games, but all the other evidence indicates girl, including an apartment Martha Stewart would be proud of). She's pretty cool. I feel quite confident announcing this here, safe in the knowledge that my gossip is going to go virtually unread :) Lucky me. Anyway, we have a neat trick: She talks in Spanish, I talk in crappy French, nobody has any idea what the other person is saying, and we all feel really cultured. Don't you wish you had my life.

man bites country

2004-11-05T09:37:00.000-08:00

So... election, blah blah, depressing, blah blah. Maybe I'm more attractive now to Americans desparate to get out of the country :) (a la www.marryanamerican.ca). Let's skip all that depressing stuff and backtrack a week to when it was just my life that was officially insane. Here's the recap:

Last Wednesday there was a full eclipse of the moon, my thesis was handed in to be bound (with a minor hiccup, but for all intents and purposes), I formally ended my two and a bit decades of being a student, and the Boston red sox overcame the curse of the bambino to win their first world series in 86 years.

Oh, and I also had an appointment to get my tax withholding set up right, and found that I have a sub-optimal health insurance plan and that I need to switch to a different one.

Then new things:

Thursday I bike out to buy bits and pieces for a Halloween costume (I already had the black pants, red shirt, sunglasses, gloves, scarf, and ice skates. I just needed devil horns and a trident and spray on snow for the glasses - what can I say, given everything that happened the day before hell MUST have frozen over. In light of recent political events, I'd say I was even prescient). So anyway I'm biking out, I come up to a stpped car, I go, he goes, we go crunch. Taking stock of the injuries afterwards I had a small graze on my thumb, a bent front wheel, and a very apologetic American on my hands who was probably convinced I was going to sue him blind.

He gave my busted-ass bike a lift home, gave me a ride back to the shop, and gave me money to cover a hefty percent of the cost of a new wheel (any shortfall being my dumb-ass fault for moving in front of him). I'm considering donating it to the national society for the promotion of hyphen-ass terms instead though. They've done more to make this paragraph better than... I don't know, the letter Q or something.

Then comes Friday. I took my bike in to get fixed... got a new wheel, a new computer to track my speed and cadence, and my rear fender finally fixed on properly (long story, but it may even have contributed to the crash by distracting me at the wrong time). And while I'm doing all this I get told about a fun ride the next day. 30 bucks and you get fed all your meals, cruise down the MKT trail to Rocheport (pretty town with a winery), drink some winery wine, and shoot on home. I figured I needed friends and missed biking, so hey, that's set.

So then I do some work and go to the Halloween party. The costumes were pretty impressive. There was a weapon of mass destruction, a box of wine, a dominatrix (with real nipple clamps on her belt), Super Mario and Luigi (with their cat dressed up as the princess - honest to God)... yeah, and me (had to explain the "cold day in hell" thing to a few people, but what can you do). There was also a punch bowl that bubbled with dry ice. VERY cool. And I met some nice people - most of whom were in clinical psych. I insist that this has nothing to do with their professional interest in me. Even if it's true. Especially in that case.

So Saturday arrives and I'm up at the crack of dawn to go biking. It turns out that half the people in the ride are dressed up too. Including one guy who dressed his whole bike up as a massive box of "Mike and Ike" candy. He even had a box of the real thing to which one could compare his handy work. I don't know if the design was more impressive or the fact that he could still ride the bike in all that boxing and construction paper. Other people had bike trailers with coolers on them, and suchlike.

Anyway, I hung back with the trail group of people, who it turns out were composed of a hefty contingent of semi-professional triathletes who were bringing large quantities of wine and beer and baileys with them and having a merry old time cruising along. One guy even had speakers wired up to his bike for portable music. They were a riot of fun, stopping every half hour, chatting it up, singing songs. I also had pitches made to me for the best places to buy bike and running stuff in town (leading candidate: "Tryathletics"). There was, for some reason, about 5 or 6 different crashes on the ride (most of which considered hilarious), a few burst tires, and a broken collar bone (not mine, not hilarious). This is apparently a phenomenally high accident rate for one of these trips, even factoring in the alcohol. There was also a toddler-sized "Barbie" peddle car that was fished out of a river and towed along behind a bike for miles and miles. Last seen it was being driven home on someone's roof rack. But not before a semi-naked guy got towed up and down the road on it.

Suffice to say that a good time was had by all, and despite my being out of shape and still racking up about 55k's (30 odd miles) on my new bike computer, I still found the energy to go out that evening and have tea with someone I met at the party the previous evening.

So then on Sunday I go and spend a few hours phoning people from the Democrat local headquarters, reminding them to go out and vote, Monday I got health insurance more sorted out (a big ordeal. Thanks private health care!) Tuesday I spent an afternoon knocking on doors reminding all the people who weren't home to vote (see I care enough about the states to try to help them - but did they listen? [sigh]). Rest of the week I did... more stuff... y'know. Ye GAWDS is this ever long already! And not that funny. Sowwy. I'd ask you to forgive me, but that would be admitting liability for the type of grievous mental harm lawsuit that you are no doubt already talking to your lawyer about.

Well, time to sign off then. Take care and read you around.

Today is the end of an era (and a long one)

2004-10-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a little while since I posted here last. This sentence is brought to you by the League of Obvious Statements (motto: "helping dumb people have conversations since 1326"). When I was in Toronto (between the wedding and coming back to Columbia) it became obvious from the questions my parents were asking that they aren't reading this thing. It is therefore something of a relief to look at the comments appearing (sporadically) here to see that at least SOMEONE out there is.

Anyway, things to report: As of TODAY I have handed in the final copy of my thesis with all the changes that were requested of it. This somehow added over 10 pages of length to the bastard... I was about to say "little bastard". Anyway, I ended up having to email it to one of my wonderful nice friends back in Waterloo, who printed it for me, and handed it in to the GSO and the graphics people (who print and bind it - it is important to have this done because people measure your seniority as a professor by the inches of dust accumulated on unopened copies of your thesis (i.e. all of them)). I am also lobbying to have hiring and tenure review committees take into acount the number of layers of parenthesis used in your blog. I think this is important.

I've also realized that having a best friend from high school who is a fully licensed tech geek is coming in handy, because I need a program set up to flashes text at people and responds to their inputs. I get to spend the rest of today working out the exact script for him to program (that and sort out overhanging issues with the ethics committee in Waterloo about this gosh darn experiment ('gosh' was invented for those who refuse to believe in 'darn' (but I used both. Which means that I'm decisive (which apparently qualifies me to be president of a largish country these days)))). (four layers of parentheses! In your face people-who-have-multiple-widely-cited-publications!)

So lets see... where were we. I defended Mr. Thesis, had a nice party to recover afterwards (in which my blood/alcohol was restored to a more humane level), spent a few more mad days meeting people in Waterloo, flew out for the wedding in the beautiful northern tip of Cape Breton Island (in a town called "Dingwall". If you shout that enough times from a street corner, passers by might give you spare change and possibly also business cards for local psychiatrists), I wore a kilt (there are apparently pictures of me being slung around at the dance afterwards, skirt riding almost dangerously high), spent a happy few days in Toronto meeting yet more people and coasting a little bit... and now I'm back 'home', finding out that health insurance in America is insanely complicated. There's a whole language of deductibles and co-pays and areas of coverage, maximum coverages, minimum this that and the others, and statements like "80% for PPO"... And you have to chose between plans that vary along many of these dimensions, obliging you to decipher what all this crap means. It makes me long for Ontario, where you just walk into a clinic, flash your health card and talk to a doctor. [sigh].

Americans apparently believe that their system is "more efficient." Presumably they aren't counting the massive synaptic commitments required to figure out exactly at which point men in suits are liable to surgically extract your vital organs to pay for all this nonsense. I would give you more examples, but my frontal cortex would try to escape down a ventricle, and I don’t think my insurance covers having it sewn back in.

Other exciting features of Columbia for the uninitiated: Homicidal traffic lights. See, back at home traffic lights follow a sequence; green, yellow, red. So if you have, say, a green light and you want to turn left you can park your lovely posterior in the middle of the intersection until there is a suitable hole in the oncoming traffic, or until the light turns yellow - hence stopping the oncoming traffic and letting you turn in relative safety. Here they use a more sophisticated system, known in specialized traffic control circles as "for God's sake don't do the same thing twice". So, if you have a green light and park yourself in the middle of an intersection waiting to turn left, the other cars will be flashed with special "do something random" signals, and you are launched into a game of death-frogger until you can escape. Note to the uninitiated: This game is extra fun when played on a bicycle - it just doesn't have the same visceral thrill when you're wearing half a ton of metal that come with seatbelts and airbags (it can then be considered merely 'hair-raising'). To be honest the actual drivers here are pretty good, and I'm the one who believes that when you're on a bike stop signs and red lights become just extra severe "yield" signs ("like really REALLY yield! I mean it!"). But still, I don't see why that should interfere with my constitutional God given right to whine.

Ok, I'll sign off now, but I promise not to take nearly such a long time with my next posting. It's sort of fun to be back in this writing head-space. Oooh, there's an email arrived. Is it my friend saying that the thesis is in ok?... hm. Sort of. It seems that I have to delete a comma and one word from the title page of my thesis, and scan my signature onto a page that has the characters "ii" added to the bottom and send all that in for Friday, and THEN it will be accepted. [sigh].

BUT, today I DID officially send in the note to withdraw from enrollment as a grad student. It has just been pointed out to me that this means that for the first time in 22ish years (depends where you start the clock), I am no longer officially a student. Wow. Is that ever a head trip.

Well, back at that grind stone then. Hang in there (me, you, everyone).

Alamo II (or "how I defended my thesis")

2004-10-05T21:50:00.000-07:00

Yes, I realize you poor shmoes haven't even had a chance to read the last bit of nonsense I posted here, but these things keep on happening to me, and... frankly I'm a sadistic bastard (read: "sadsack idiot using a webpage for an instant imaginary audience").
So this very afternoon at 3 o'clock, the Alice Bast Conference Room at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) was sandbagged, an army of examiners were brought in from as far away as London (the nearby one), a thesis was presented for 30 minutes (on the dot, very proud of that one thankyouverymuch), and then two hours of cross examination commenced. But now it is over and done with, and a platoon of crack interior decorators are spackling madly away at the holes letting dusty sunlight into the back hallway, and are applying the aesthetically correct amounts of duct tape and plywood where the windows used to be.
And when all was said and done, what was the verdict? Apparently I "clean up well" (said one professor), and "should wear that suit more often" (said another). Thanks Danny and Geoff! um. The only other real fallout is that I was told I "passed conditionally", which means that I have to make a few changes to the thesis and hand it in, and then it's good to go. For those not in academe, this is a fairly normal result to a thesis defence, especially one written inside of a month, and is nothing to cry over (unless you are the sadsack idiot who gets stuck making the stupid corrections). So according to local tradition I get to call myself "doctor" now, and next summer when the graduation ceremony thing happens (whether I am present or not) I get to call myself that officially too. Well sorta kinda... I'm not the medical type of doctor, you understand.

In other exciting news, we had the bachelor party for my friend Chris. We knew that he would be a good boy and not doing anything the least bit lewd, but we figured we could at least mess with his head... The stories wouldn't be funny unless you knew the people in qustion, but suffice it to say that we had him absolutely and totally convinced of some fairly outlandish things (someone's girlfriend he hadn't met before was an escort, etc). We also pulled stunts like marching into the local police headquarters, and persuading the staff seargent on duty to sign and put his badge number on a document witnessing Chris' promise never again to engage in the dangerous activity of "drinking and shopping cart riding".

So now I have one more day in Waterloo of madly meeting everyone I can fit in, I fly to Cape Breton Island for the wedding, fly back to Toronto to be with family for a few days, and then back down south to continue americanating myself.... ah yes. But in the meantime I'm enjoying being back in a town where I know my way around, and frequently run in to people that I know. It really is nice to see everyone again(did I tell you, I'm turning into a suck in my old age).

Comment wars: Nothing to report. You've pretty much all gone silent (i.e. "have lives"). Or maybe I was just too rude before in the face of nice and forgiving comments. Come back, come back, wherever you are!
(this pathos brought to you by the number 8, and the adjective "punctilious").

Flag report: Still up on the wall inside the appartment. I presume.

Blog report: Still obsessed with the stupid flag.

Well toodles folks (actually "folk". Thanks for reading whoever you are).
Look after yourself eh.

Alex

of miracles and the department of homeland security

2004-09-28T22:11:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to write another entry so soon. I have research to get together, a thesis defence to plot out, a bachelor party to plan, and various odds and ends that need stamps sticking to them (it's true! it's true!).
But last night a miraculous thing arrived in the post. Actually two. One was from the social security office. There are CEO's out there who would poison whole villages for the sake of a 6 or 7 digit number, but me? I got one with 9, oh yes (note to Canadians: A social security number has 9 digits because they were invented by a person who thought that telephone numbers were too easy to remember). (note to non-North Americans: telephone numbers here have 7 digits). (note to people who like to read notes: Don't you feel happy now?).
Anyway, what this means is that my payroll can now function, that I can finally get a missouri email account, access to the libraries, a cell phone if I wanted... Life is now much more possible in the US of A.

The REALLY important thing, though, that arrived in the mail was a flier advertising a "Revelation Now PROPHECY SEMINAR". It is big and colourful and has these great pictures of monsters on the front cover that sent me right back to my misspent youth playing Dungeons and Dragons. On the inside it has this big montage which has pictures of a gun with evidence tags on it, a woman with a third-world looking baby, a starving man, a guy in a gas mask, pipes pouring industrial stuff into a pond, some kid looking despondent, razor wire, and the planet earth (centered about about venezuela by look of it). So clearly they are concerned with the World's problems! But in traditional American fashion they undersell themselves because all the caption says is: "The New Millennium Has Arrived [they have a severe capitalization fetish. Or maybe God does, and I just never realized. That'll Teach Me To Pay More Attention] Confidence, Stability and Security can be yours through these insightful presentations!". So they know about all these big problems in the world, and they just want to make me feel a bit better about myself. Isn't that nice of them! They could have burdened me with solutions to these tricky problems, but instead they took the modest road and just want me to be more confident. Thanks guys, I'm touched!

In other news, due to minor beaurocratic screw ups, and someone guessing I was younger than I am, I was told that I might not be allowed back in the country when I go home next week. Ha ha ha... But it all worked out. I would fill you in with the actual details, but they are frankly boring, and this little precis is way more exciting. In a nutshell it turns out that I'm a "visiting scholar", not an undergrad, the presentation I missed (which turns out to be vitally important) has been rescheduled for later on, and someone signed a little box in a form saying that I can be readmitted to the country. Yaaaay me.

And comments... apparently I'm quick witted, non-culpable, and need new friends (it's all there in the comments section, really truly). Yup, there it is. So... Did you know that "John Stone presents a crystal clear study of the Bible Prophecies affecting you today?" Says so right here! Also, "his enthusiastic dedication to the God of the Bible is contagious." Big relief there, I thought for a minute he might be enthusiastic about the other God. Phew!

Of tea, social skills, and the right type of food.

2004-09-25T11:36:00.000-07:00

CULTURAL ACHIEVEMENTS: I went to a Coffee shop called "Dakota." It is apparently popular with the psych grad student crowd. It's a fairly spacious place with lots of people using lap tops and chairs all made out of some substance that is either raw tree branches, or a moderately convincing simulation thereof. They're quite comfy, so my guess is the latter. They even had a good selection of loose leaf tea! For just 2 bucks (approximately fifty thousand Canadian dollars) you can get a "globe", which is a round glass tea pot with a perforated cylinder in the middle full of tea leaves. There's also a plunger on the cylinder so that you can squash your tea leaves if you think the tea is getting too strong, or, I don't know, you have rage issues associated with tea leaf readings.
It's weird ordering a "globe" of tea though. It really threw me until I saw one. I guess they are sort of like those little "snow scene" globe things, except that if you shook them hard enough the "snow" drifting down would be brown and chunky. Which would be somewhat disturbing, now that I think about it, if not as much as the scalding water you would have sprayed all over yourself. I guess it's one of those "if a tree falls in the forest, and you're too busy dealing with second degree burns to notice it..." type of questions.

LATEST EPISODE OF CULTURE SHOCK: My roommate may be a laid back guy who's quite happy using the box the microwave came in as a coffee table, but he seems to buy into all these crazy rules about what you're supposed to eat when. For example, I went to the kitchen and lo, there was peanut butter and jelly ("jam" to the English-English speaking world), and sliced ham. So I put them into a sandwich. My roomie thought this was funny. Apparently you're not supposed to put these things together. I had a glass of orange juice with it, which was apparently also odd because you're supposed to drink milk with this meal. Orange juice is to be drunk with breakfast, I was told. Who made these crazy rules? Milk is for breakfast, everyone knows that! It goes on your cereal.
But it continues! I lamented that we don't have sugar for tea. "What about honey?" says roomie, "or lemon." Now I've heard of this before, but it just seems a bit... well, fancy. I tell him this. But, "drinking tea at all is fancy". Aie, the culture shock! I pointed out that tea is only fancy if you drink it from a tiny cup with an impractically small handle. Tea out of a big mug is just a cuppa, and there's nothing posh about that.
Then I tried to persuade him to go out and chuck a frisbee in the park across the street. He looked at me like I was missing even more screws, but I told him it's fun and I'm missing ultimate. He'll "think about it" [sigh].

LATEST COMMENTS DEVELOPMENT: Some poor girl posts a nice little compliment here, and all of a sudden is subject to a suggestive debate about my virtues. I'll apologize for that now. And then I'll roll with it some more because it's quite amusing.
Are there any lessons to be drawn from this whole fuss? Here's what I have so far:
I am single. "How could this possibly be," you ask? "Does he not have it all?" A a microwave? An office with 2 (TWO!) windows? A BLOG read by upwards of 3 people? "What more could anybody want in a man?"... Well lets consider the BLOG comment exchange. Here is some totally random girl whom I've known for about 100 written words at a distance of somewhere over 700 miles, and already I have her pouting. Go go bachelor social skills! A mystery no more.

Blog goes listy

2004-09-23T18:21:00.000-07:00

An email sent to my friends, reproduced here for [insert good reason].

Yes, I know, you're hearing from me more now that I'm gone than before I left. Holy shmunky, this is turning into a lot of spam! I promise promise promise that this will be the last blog related massmail that I will send out*. If you want broadcasts about my doings from now on, you'll have to either read below, or watch America's Most Wanted like everyone else.

*Unless I send another one.

Anyway, some people have said to me "Alex, I'm too lazy to check a website regularly, is there a way of getting the posts mailed to me?" Yes, people really said this, I'm not making it up.
Well it turns out there is! (Although it may be a better use of your time to check directly into a mental health institution).

SO! I've set up this google group thingy so that Blog entries will post to it automatically. IF YOU WANT, then, you can sign up to the group (see below) and get all this nonsense sent directly to your inbox. Or, if you prefer, you can just read it online when the fancy strikes you (remember, http://canada-south.blogspot.com/), or you can quietly get on with your life, or poke your eyeballs out with hot skewers, or really whatever else floats your boat. Never let it be said that I don't provide options.

Extra note: I've now set up the blog so that you don't have to join anything to post comments.

Extra extra note: If you visit the online Blog repeatedly, I find it's a good idea to hit "reload". Otherwise it will just show you the page you downloaded last time, and not any of the new stuff that may (or may not) have appeared since.

How to get the announcements. Easy. Go to:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/BLOG-heck
then click on the button labelled "Sign in and apply for membership". It's in the middle of the screen near the bottom.
All you have to do then is put in an email addy and make up a password... they verify you, and you're good to go. (I think - it's been a little flakey at times... you got problems, you let me know).

Cheers!
Alex "who provides options" Blogs

Put that in your visa and smoke it

2004-09-21T21:19:00.000-07:00

FLAG STATUS: Down! I came home and it was gone... The landlord made my roommate take it down. I seem to recall seeing something in our contracts about not hanging things like that in our windows, so not a big surprise. And to be fair, the landlord was pretty good about letting it stay up a while. She could have been a big jerk, but she wasn't. The flag is now back to hanging on our living room wall with a fresh but faint wood stain newly upon it. My obnoxiously patriotic Canadian flag chair is now out on the balcony in its place. Hopefully nobody will steal it (such a nice neighbourhood).

RECENT ACHIEVEMENTS: I now have an American visa card! And when they send me a PIN number I'll be able to use it like an interact card in any place that takes visa. Sweet. Now I just need American money to use it with.
PROBLEM: How do you get American money?
1) Wire it from a Canadian account. Drawback: That costs like 60 bucks. I am avoiding it.
2) Withdraw money from Canadian account via a cash machine. Pro: you now have cash, and it only costs 2 or 3 bucks. Con: You can't get a huge amount out at once. I managed to get enough out to pay rent once already - but you're not supposed to do that on a regular basis.
3) Use your Canadian visa card to pay for things. It works, but I'm not sure how much it costs. I've done a lot of this though, so it's probably very expensive. How expensive? Dunno, but I'm guessing that should I ever have children, I won't have to worry about raising the first few (my Dad is reading this now and kicking himself, cos I'm a first born son).
4) Get paid. Pros: You get money. Cons: You have to do work for it (normally). There's a chance this may happen to me later this month. The paperwork went in today! Said paperwork, though, includes a document with my wrong birth date on it (it says Jan 1, which is 6 days early). But I already got across the border using that document, so I consider it an official second birthday now. I hope you're listening out there, I'm expecting extra gifts.

RECENT NON-ACHIEVEMENT: I appear not to have a sandwich toaster. It should have come with me from Canada, but I can't find it. In a related note, my roommate is now officially living with somebody who has wandered around the kitchen saying "now if I was a sandwich toaster, where would I be? Think like a sandwich toaster."
- Oh well, I can always use my microwave to fill in. Speaking of which, it works! Well, in the sense that it makes things hot, but not in the sense that it makes them visible. There's no light in it. It was a cheap microwave.
- Relevant questions: Do you really need to be able to see your food while it cooks? Would a flashlight explode if you put it in a microwave? Probably. Ah well, it's lucky then that I don't have a flashlight.

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS: People are actually posting comments on this thing, by God! One of them is even from (and if you don't believe me, you can look this up) "A Girl." True fact: the word "girl" is internet for "six four hairy man with body odour who may or may not be peeking through your window at this exact moment." Having people peek in through my window is frankly worrying. There's got to be at least one better looking person than me SOMEWHERE in Columbia.
- It's just not fair, though, is it? Here's this person going out of their way to say nice things about my blog, and here I am, the big jerk, making fun of them. Sorta kinda. BTW, the phrase "big jerk" is internet for "really swell guy, gee willakers."
- Dunky boy: It was a reference to the 12 tasks of Hercules: He had to clean out some huge messy stable, slay a few monsters, get off a spam list, use AOL, etc. You need to bone up on your mythology my good doctor!

Hercules was a wuss

2004-09-20T15:23:00.000-07:00

Major achievement for yestarday: I bought a microwave! A real one! First time ever for me. Haven't used it yet, but that just doesn't seem as important as HAVING BOUGHT it.

Major achievement for today: I applied for a social security number.

Background: Life in the US is pretty much impossible without one of these bad boys. You can't get a phone, it's hard to open a bank account, they asked for it when I wanted to rent my apartment (and I just persuaded the nice lady to let go without one)... anything where they want to do a credit check on you - which seems to be a lot of things.

How to get one: First you have to find an expert, who can tell you to wait 2 weeks after you have entered the country before you go apply (it takes them that long to merge relevant databases). Then you wait it out, and undergo a Trial by Ordeal. Or, as they put it in official terms "you have to go to the social security office." By which they mean the new address, and not the one still in mapquest.

What this involves: You get on your trusty bicycle and head 2.5 miles down one of the big streets through town. After a mile you pass the crazy stadium and go under a bridge that has a huge yellow M (suspiciously like the Michigan M), and you're thinking "wow, this is easy. Now where is the side street I'm supposed to turn on?"
And then the road starts getting a bit bigger and there's a hard shoulder, and you see a speed limit sign saying "55 MPH" (i.e. 90 km/h) and you go "oh shit, I should get over onto that hard shoulder."
So then you bike a long for a while admiring the large concrete barrier separating the lanes of traffic, wondering how you'll possibly get over it with your bike, while dodging speeding morons in pickup trucks... until you find the right traffic light. Problem solved. Then you wait in an office, fill out a form, and ask if there's a better way to get home. "No, the other highway has a speed limit of 70 miles per hour". No problem, back to the 55 mph one. You made it once, you can do it again, right? Well except the hard shoulder on the OTHER side (the one you're now biking along) is made of cracked up concrete, and covered in gravel. And it goes through this big valley with a huge hill in it - which means that you go pretty fast if you're not careful. Now keep in mind that a few days ago I had biked down this really nice and pretty GRAVEL trail, went around a corner too fast (which is to say "not very fast at all"), and wiped out. I am still missing a certain square yardage of skin from my hand and knee from this encounter. So there I am rolling down this GRAVEL hill, cars shooting past me at highway speeds, trying not think about imanent death.

BUT: If I survive another week, they should mail me a social security card.

So woe is me, right? Let's put this in perspective: According to the CBC, "An Austrian man who tried to hold police at bay by swinging deadly cobras at them was in hospital on Monday with a gunshot wound and a snake bite." (http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2004/09/20/snakeman040920.html). See, you think you have problems. But then you read stories like this, fall off your chair laughing, and THEN you have problems (reaching the keyboard, for one).

True entertaining fact: My new favourite channel is C-span. This is not a joke. It turns out that they have all these interesting, smart, and often important people, whom they show giving talks and being in panel discussions. They talk about all of these crazy things that are happening (terrorism, international relations, etc). Compare this to the Canadian version of C-SPAN, which is the inhumane alternative to having your toe nails ripped out.

Not entertaining fact: I had another meeting with my prof today. We're developing ideas and turning them into increasingly concrete research proposals to be sent to the internal ethics review board before I go back to Canada for a few weeks in October (defend, get Chris and Heather married (yes, this same Chris who is chastising me for not watching enough Simpsons. He’s right of course… I haven’t seen it ONCE since I came here. But I’ve watched King of Queens and a lot of sports with my roommate. And C-SPAN), etc).

Football and other major achievements

2004-09-19T11:04:00.001-07:00

Flag status: Still up outside and flapping (though it does tend to stick to tree branches that hang against it.

Newest bestest achievements in my life:

I have now successfully bought and installed a curtain rod and actual curtain. There was way too much light leaking in at night through the crappy blind over my window (in my lovely appartment - yes, lovely), so I got an exapndable curtain rod, nailed it to the wall, and hung a big red curtian from it. This equipment all bought inexpensively from a major huge evil american mega store (it has a bad habit of moving in and shutting down all the local businesses). Somehow it just doesn't feel as evil shopping there when you do it inthe states though. Clearly other people have nailed up curtains before me, because in the prime curtain-nailing areas there is a bunch of spackling filling in old holes. Anyway, this may not be exciting to you, but it is about the most advanced house construction I've done to date, so I'm sticking with bragging about it. I promise that the rest of this post will be more entertaining, starting right AFTER the next sentence. It turns out that I can't pull my new curtain open very easily, so I have comandeered the ribon that the Canadian flag came wrapped up in to tie it open in the daytime.

I tried to go out and see a movie with my downstairs neighbour, but it was sold out (Control room - good film, BTW)... so we went and had coffee and chatted. Turns out he's this interesting guy who was in the army for a few years, and then did journalism, dropped out in disgust and is now doing English. He does some writing too, so we'll trade stories for feedback and criticism.

And now the hilight: Football.

I've been watching lots of sports with my roomie, but on Saturday I went to an actual in-the-flesh Missori football game. One of my neighbours gave me a spare ticket the day before, and was then was nowhere to be found in the stands. Oh well. It was quite an experience anyway.
Let me put it in context. When an american friend (Alison) was visiting Waterloo we told her that a typical crowd at a Waterloo football game was maybe 30 or 40, and she said "oh, that's not much", and we had to explain that this meant 30 people, not 30 THOUSAND. There were over 50 thousand at this game (population of Columbia approx 80 thousand). About a third to a half of them were wearing yellow (the team colour), and probably a better percent than that were wearing some official form of Tigers merchandise. They also had this large band (maybe 50 people) that would play pretty much the whole time the players weren't. You've seen them on tv dressed up in those big dorky outfits? Yep, them. At half time they even had a bunch of the local high school bands come and stand on the field and play with them, so they had all these conductors standing up on ladders waving strict 4/4 together.
They also had a largish contingent of chearleaders doing chorographed dances the whole time (the whole COMPLETE time), and they had this cannon that would make a loud bang every time the Tigers (Mizzou) scored anything. This happened a lot, because Mizzou won 48 nothing. The first few times Mizzou scored, the chearleaders grabbed these banners spelling "Missouri", and ran across the end zone (there were a lot of banners and fancy pantsy uniforms around this field). I think they got bored of this by the end though. Or maybe I just got bored and stopped paying attention. They also had these guys dressed all in yellow who hung out near the cannon, who's job was to run onto the field for no apparent reason and do push ups with the mascot at random intervals.
Let's just put it this way: The raw calories burned by people not playing football that afternoon would have gotten your generic sumo wrestler though a shortish marathon.

Interesting facts:
1) They played a "fight song". Nobody fought. Bad song you ask? No, the tune is "It's a long way to Tipperary", which is pretty cool, if not exactly original.
2) The team they were playing was "Ball state". There are 50 states in the USA, and none of them are called "Ball." None of them even start with "b". Conclusions: a) Americans are a whole lot less educated than even we thought they were, or b) Mizzou just invented this team to beat up on to make up for their last game, which was an embarrassing loss, or c) it's wishful thinking from hardcore sports fans that there SHOULD be such a place. Take your pick, but if it was the (c), they probably shouldn't have gotten beaten up that badly. Frankly, it was sort of embarassing by the end.
3) there appeared to be about twice as many players on the missouri team as the ball state team (the mizzou sidelines were WAY more crowded). Ok, so that's not an interesting fact. But uh... did you know that after the game they just had all the street lights on the major roads flashing yellow ("yield") instead of being red and green. There, you are more stimulated already, I can tell.

Totaly irrelevant fact: Two nights ago there was a huge amount of thunder and some quite spectacular lightning, but there was no sign of anything wet landing on anybody but the terminally unlucky (as in NO RAIN). Apparently the weather here suffers from an identity crisis. I would make a killing if only I'd chosen CLINICAL psych.

Once upon a time there was a little boy who drove a big truck south

2004-09-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

There is now a new blog in your life. Deal with it.

This is actually the first OFFICIAL post to this Blog. I've already sent two emails out to a whole huge pile of people I know about my new life plunging south of the 49th parallel. These are reproduced here with their approximate send dates as the first 2 entries.
But regarding these emails, many people thought "oh, I'm glad I heard from him, I hope he doesn't get into the habit of writing this sort of thing, I already have way too much crap in my inbox." Other people foolishly wrote to me and said "thanks for the update" and "keep me on the list". I won't tell you who, as these people do not deserve the punishment they would receive (okay, they deserve every lick of it, but they made me happy so I'm sticking up for them). I even promised that the last one was the final update... so am I a big fat liar?

Well, rather than stuff these things down people's throats, I thought I would create an online blog which I can update as often as I like, and which you can all subsequently ignore to your heart's content. I don't know how long I will keep this up before my attention wanders (as it is wont to do - hey, it happens to the best of us), but hopefully it'll be about 1 day longer than before YOUR collective attention wanders (as it is wont to do, you undisciplined ingrates).

Alright, let the action begin! Uh, continue! Grr.
(didn't I tell you, I'm a big fat liar).

Update II

2004-09-15T21:02:00.000-07:00

Here's the 2nd email. Not sure when exactly I sent this one out, and don't care exactly, so I'll just guess at the date.

So many of you have written to me saying "send more mass mails, I can't get enough of them," that I decided never to write another one in my life, just to spite you. But then all this news happened.

I'll keep this one short, and promise that it'll be my last.

Important things that have happened to me recently:

-I now have wireless Internet access in my apartment. This is muchly nifty, and has brought out my inner geek. My room mate is amused.

-I have bought new fenders for my bike because the last crappy ass ones were too busted. I started installing them, but it seems that because of a weird way my bike is set up, they need a hole drilling in them first. Will get the shop to do that tomorrow (in the mean time bike is leaning against a wall with no wheels or fenders).

-I paid off the largest credit card bill of my life to date.

-I have acquired Good Mr. Telephone. my number is ([SUPPRESSED FOR INTERNET POSTING - only had the phone a few days, and already had some telemarketers call] Or at least, this is the theory propagated by the phone company - nobody has attempted to call me yet (jerks. Just because I didn't give you the number. Clearly nobody loves me).

-As of this afternoon I have a student type ID card that says I'm "staff". This is vaguely unnerving.

-I had a meeting with the local social-cog / neuro-cog type prof and he's really interesting and we had a great chat.

-I had the big meeting with my advisor (or whatever you call it), where I presented most of the things I had thought up while off reading his articles, and my ideas for research. We had a really good chat, and he managed to feign considerable enthusiasm. Yaaaay :) Now I get to go program Inquisit again. That'll really take me back to the days in Colorado .

-and Finally (saving the best for last), I watched Canada win the world cup of hockey last night, and then hung the big Canadian flag (thoughtfully given to me by friends before I left) off the balcony outside our apartment. It is now a prominent feature of the building (it's about 4 or 5 feet long). I was going to take it down today, but it's been bucketing rain (first rain we've had since I arrived)... this evening it was just torrential... I biked 3 blocks with my new fenders in a plastic bag dangling from my handlebars, and was totally soaked by the time I got in the door. Even my socks were translucent cotton bags. This was not, incidentally a total shock, because I had already noticed when biking around the industrial grade run-off sewers they seem to have around here. They must have put those things in for a reason, I had reasoned at the time. Anyway, the flag is still out there, utterly soaked, and my roommate (from Detroit) professes to like it and wants to keep it up. We'll see... it will stay for the now :)

Right, I promised it would be short, and so it is (well, short-ISH).

Take care all!
I'm off to scrounge dinner.

Columbia MO

2004-09-10T17:55:00.000-07:00

Here is the first email that I sent out. I will even set the date on this retroactively so that it appears here on the date that I sent the original message. Here we go:

Well folks, here I is! All moved and settled (well, mostly) in Columbia, Missouri, US of A.

First thing: You know how I've said to some of you "well ha ha, if you're ever dropping through missouri, ha ha, do drop by and say hello. Ha ha ha, as if that'll ever happen."? Well you should. It's really really really pretty down here. When I first arrived in my big U-haul and opened the door it was this sub-tropical steam bath with cicada's singing a merry little symphony, and broad leaf sorts of plants surrounding the swimming pool that is, oh, maybe 30 meters from my front door. Since then it's generally been a lot cooler, which is probably a good thing given the large quantities of stuff I've been physically mauling around.
Anyway, the city has this slightly villagy feel to it, and there are lots of trees, and the campus is integrated right into the town and has lots of old buildings with southern sorts of influences. It's honestly one of the prettiest campuses I've seen to date.
I now have a large amount of rapidly acquired furniture, a desk that took about 4 hours to assemble (very big and complicated but I love it), a nice swivel chair (delivered this morning, still in box), couches, stools, a tv, high speed access (not quite yet fully wired up), etc. I also have a really nice corner office with 2 windows in a building that used to be a hospital, I think, and most recently was the headquarters for some journal. I've already put up the certificate that I was thoughtfully given before I left Canada, proclaiming my membership in the National Toy Rifle Association. Next step is to get the Canadian flag up in my room at home (home being much further behind on the decorating/arranging front than the office).

New vitals
Address:
SUPPRESSED (good for private emails, bad bad bad for everyone to get on the web).

Phone: Don't actually have one yet. But as of this morning I do have an honest to God american bank account with 50 bucks in it.

Email: I'll keep checking this account, but I believe that in theory I have this new one at SUPPRESSED@mizzou.edu
In any event, if you are sending things to the waterloo address the "watarts.uwaterloo.ca" will continue to work for a while but will at some point become "alumni.uwaterloo.ca". Simplest solution is to just send things to "SUPRPESED@uwaterloo.ca" and let the server take care of where to stick it exactly.

Anyway, this weekend I plan to get out and take a nice long bike trip. There's a trail which apparently goes down to the river, and then if you're super hard core, even a few miles further down to some really pretty village, the name of which currently escapes me. Escaping names is something of a feature of life down here... I keep meeting people (most of whom are very nice and friendly), and then trying desperately to recall who in they are. Actually I'm not doing too too badly. I went to the social brownbag today, and it was weird seeing the differences and similarities with Waterloo. It was basically a lot the same, but they're way less oriented to social cog type stuff, so things that would have been picked up in Waterloo really quickly just bounced off their backs, but they had all these interesting other takes on things that wouldn't necessarily have come up back 'home'. Hard to describe, and half of you aren't in social anyway so I won't burden you all.

So anyway, my apartment is really nice (sharing it with this guy called Chris who's a 1st year grad student in Russian studies. He's from detroit and seems pretty laid back, which is good). It's not only nice (it has a nice balcony with nice trees outside and everything), but it's in this really central location which puts me close to everything, which is also very nice. I'm biking myself in to school every day, and cruising all the shops in between. And holy shmunky, it's amazing how much stuff you buy when you move in somewhere new. If Bush wins the election it may be single handedly due to the boost I'm providing to the American economy, and I will hang my head in shame.

Right, okay, well I will get back to doing some readings now - the prof I'm working for has given me a whole bunch of readings to get me into the head space of his world, and I'm supposed to zip through all of this stuff and come up with ideas. Then we'll meet next week and talk about them, and he will point and laugh and send me back to Waterloo, and I'll say "okay, but you're renting the u-haul to get me home, and you should see how much stuff I have now", and then he'll say "check mate. I'll send off for your permanent residence card then." Except first he'll probably also say "holy shmunky, that's a lot of stuff." Because "holy shmunky" is a great phrase and everyone should use it more.

Okay, I've already rambled at you a lot now, so I will leave you with the last thought of something to be thankful about living in Canada for: We don't have Fox "news". I watched it last night for the first real time and it was so carefully dressed up as being objective while so consistently picking away at the democrats and shoring up the Republicans that I nearly threw something at the TV when they talked about how impartial they were, and how their audience share is bigger than MSNBC and CNN together.
So anyway, a new slogan for your promotional consideration:
Fox "news"! making journalists everywhere else look good!

blech.

okay, take care y'all