The Essential Works of Julia Uhr

Guilty Reading Pleasures

2011-04-15T23:30:00.005-06:00

My boyfriend suggested yesterday that we watch the miniseries of Stephen King's "The Stand," because he liked the book. Since we've only been dating for a year, I was shocked by his casual confession of such a deep and personal flaw.

It reminded me of an NPR story from last summer, where legitimate writers, supposedly people of taste, revealed their guilty summer reading pleasures. Writer Joshua Braff admitted that he enjoys John Irving, and Karen Abbott confessed to drawing insight from "Destiny Times Six: An Astrologer's Casebook."

At the time, my reaction was to applaud the courage of these writers. We are all flawed humans, weak to resist the temptation of mysteries where cats help find clues. Why not admit the weird stuff we're into and try to live openly, relating to each other on a more honest and authentic level?

I'll tell you why not. Pretensions and affectations, elitism and snobbery allow us to create an image of what we want to be, and when we aspire to be the sort of people who read Tolstoy and Jose Saramago, with an occasional McSweeney's thrown in for comic relief, we affirm the value of good literature over bestsellers.

None of us is perfect, but when we publicly air our flaws to make them seem normal and acceptable, we as a culture, sink deeper into the abyss of "pop". If an NPR reviewer tells you it's okay to read romance novels, you no longer have to feel guilty about it, so what will your new guilty pleasure be? Reader's Digest condensed classics? Reading "Playboy" actually for the articles?

Go on reading your Anne Rice, my dears, but please keep it to yourselves.

Common "Knowledge"

2011-04-11T23:48:00.000-06:00

I am always a little bit disturbed when I find out that a piece of common knowledge is actually false. Everyone knows that it's good to drink six cups of water a day and that Neil Armstrong said "One small step for a man, one giant leap for man kind," even though neither is true, and it's upsetting to have your strongly held beliefs shaken, no matter how trivial they may be.

We've all heard about the study where scientists poked electrodes into the pleasure centers of rats' brains so that they would be pleasantly stimulated every time they pulled a lever. We also "know" that the rats pulled the lever at the expense of every other activity until they eventually starved to death.

Not so. It turns out that the scientists, while they did conclude that the rats would have starved themselves to death, did not actually let the rats die. In a rare instance of psychologists not being as creepy to animals as they could be, they removed the electrodes before the rats starved to death. It's actually kind of sweet. But the important thing is that now you know, and your set of beliefs is a little bit closer to the truth.

Sorry, Jim Emerson

2011-04-06T18:28:00.002-06:00

It seems that I was wrong about Jim Emerson. He's actually a pretty neat guy. He was responsible for the concept of today's panel, Argument Clinic: Why Discussion Fails, in which Jim Emerson, William Nack, and Tina Packer tried to explain the phenomenon of people whose beliefs cannot be altered by logical argumentation.

Scientists who don't believe in global warming, birthers, Fox News "journalists," millennial cultists, and a man who goes by Second Amendment Joe seem to become more entrenched in their ridiculous opinions the more they are confronted with logical opposition. This can be quite upsetting, and if nothing else, the panel made us feel a tad less alone in the belief that a "fair and balanced" interpretation of reality needn't necessarily account for the opinions of crazy people.

Tip: Quote Hitler at People

2011-03-31T13:49:00.003-06:00

I have a new favorite technique for arguing, dear readers. It goes like this: An obnoxious person offers an opinion, and you quote Hitler agreeing with them.

For example...

Guy "When the government uses our tax dollars to pay for welfare, poor people have no incentive to find jobs instead of mooching off the system forever."

Me "As a Christian, I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice."

Guy "Who said that?"

Me "Hitler."

I am looking forward to using this technique on my anarchist friend, who likes to criticize the democratic process by saying that if people are not fit to rule themselves, we have no reason to believe they are fit to choose rulers. My response to this is "Sooner will a camel pass through a needle's eye than a great man be discovered by an election."

I do not suggest doing this to people whose company you enjoy. I am fully willing to admit that the technique is fallacious and irritating, but as Hitler would say, "I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few."

CWA 63

2011-03-30T20:32:00.003-06:00

For as long as I can remember, Roger Ebert has attended CU's Conference on World Affairs every spring to host the Cinema Interruptus event, where he would screen great movies, pausing every few minutes to comment, discuss interesting points, and take questions from the audience.

No longer capable of speech, Ebert will not be attending this year's conference (happening next Monday through Friday). He will be succeeded as Interruptus host by a fellow called Jim Emerson, who has chosen A Serious Man as his debut film.

Now I like the Coen brothers as much as the next person, but I fear that, if Mr. Emerson takes A Serious Man as his starting point, it will only be a few years until we are debating cinematographic tropes in Eclipse.

It is only fair to note that Jim Emerson has hosted the Cinema Interruptus twice in the past. I did not attend but have been told that it was not entirely uninformative. Still, Ebert will be missed, and I can only hope that the pain of his absence will be mitigated by Friday's colloquium on Everything Sounds Smarter and Sexier with a British Accent.

Noncognitivism May be a Downer

2011-03-26T22:37:00.003-06:00

It occurred to me just now that being a noncognitivist is perhaps not as much fun as I had hoped.

A noncognitivist believes that moral statements have no truth value; 'killing people is bad,' means something along the lines of 'don't kill people, it makes me sad.' This is appealing for many reasons. Noncognitivism allows us to avoid the messy question of what kind of fact a moral fact is while explaining why we generally want things to happen when we judge them to be morally good. It wraps up the entirety of ethics into a convenient little package as delectable as a tiny blue box from Tiffany.

However, I am also a determinist, and those who still believe in free will sometimes ask me "Don't you find it depressing to believe that everything you think and do was predetermined from the beginning of time?" I usually respond by saying "I think and do certain things because I'm a smart, educated person with the same basic preferences as any decent person. There's nothing depressing about that. What's scary is the notion that my beliefs and actions are not caused by something, that everything I do is random and meaningless and unrelated in any but a coincidental manner to everything ever. How can you free willers live with yourselves?"

You can see my dilemma. I do certain things because I have certain preferences, and I have certain preferences, because... I can't say "Because I'm a rational person;" for the most part, preferences can't be characterized as rational or irrational. Nor can I say "Because I'm a good person," since the word 'good' already refers to my preferences.

There is a physical cause of my preferences, but noncognitivism can offer no reason for them. This is a little bit sad. If you ask a moral realist "Why do you want me to jump in that pond and rescue you from drowning?" he will say "Because it's the right thing to do." If you ask a noncognitivist, all he can say is "DO IT."

Putting aside for a moment the relative persuasiveness of these arguments, it makes me sad to not have reasons.

Of course, there are many things which are both sad and true, and my preference for being correct still overrides my preference for being happy. I therefore remain a noncognitivist. But I sincerely wish, dear readers, that I could tell you why.

Return of the Toads

2011-03-21T17:13:00.004-06:00

Something important has happened, dear readers. Something so important as to drag me out of blog hibernation after over a year and a half of ignoring you, which makes this very awkward and so should assure you of the extreme urgency of this announcement.

I'm sure you all remember the 80s cult classic documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, which educated us about the plague of toads that began taking over Australia when they were artificially introduced to an environment with no natural predators. It introduced us to the dangers of messing about in ecology as well as cool stuff to do with cane toads, e.g. feeding them cat food, swerving to hit them in your truck, and smoking them.

So you will be as excited as I to discover that there is now a sequel. Cane Toads: The Conquest is almost certainly an epic adventure punctuated by trenchant insights into human (and toad) nature. I have not yet seen the film, but rest assured that you will be alerted the moment it hits Netflix. And if you are friends with a high school biology teacher, ask him or her if you can borrow it.

Racist Soda Pop

2009-06-16T16:58:00.004-06:00

One would suppose that a store named Giant Eagle would sell only the classiest of groceries, but one would be mistaken. Wikipedia has this to say about Cherikee Red:

"Most commonly found in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the soda is rarely found outside of these two states. Despite not being as commercially successful as other popular cherry sodas, it has a popular nostalgic value within the distribution region of Cotton Club bottling."

When in Rome... ?

A Small Room and Big Catsup

2009-06-15T15:13:00.007-06:00

After crepes yesterday, Trae and I spent the afternoon at the Carnegie museum.

Having seen the Sistine Chapel, I am less struck by the art historical import of a mediocre Monet than I would have been a few years ago, but Trae, who was raised in Georgia, marveled at the thickness of the paint and took pictures of himself pointing at his favorite Rothko, reminding me of what it is like to be young.

The collection of American art featured an impressive portrait by Sargent and a landscape by Kensett, my decidedly favorite luminist, but the highlight of the visit was 'Opera for a Small Room,' an installation by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.

As my dear readers surely are aware, hermit shacks are some of my favorite things, and the afore mentioned small room is a plywood hermit shack with glassless windows through which viewers can peer to the soundtrack of opera interspersed with commentary, trains, hypnotism, and rain. The idea was conceived when the artists bought the record collection that once belonged to R. Dennehy from a thrift store in a small town in British Columbia. A plaque outside the gallery explained that Cardiff and Miller were curious about the seeming contradiction of a man from a small town listening to opera, so they created a fictional narrative and environment to explain it. I enjoyed their charming condescension towards the populace of rural Canada and found the installation to be engaging and likable. I have only

two points of critique.

First, we shall assume that the half gallon Heinz tomato can hanging in the center of the shack, displayed in the museum's Heinz Gallery was just a tasteless coincidence, but in a town where the population listens to the symphony in Heinz Hall and worships in Heinz Chapel, we may be in error by assuming that anything is too sacred to be used as a vehicle of catsup promotion. Second, the artists gave R. Dennehy no place to sleep.

On a different note, I am glad my dear readers have discovered that "blog" questions are never as simple as they appear. It is most probable that the last roll will cancel out the one before it, and it is also most probable that the last roll will add to the sequence. That is why dominance arguments are more complicated in infinite partitions.

The Matter/Antimatter Tetrahedron Game

2009-06-12T21:17:00.005-06:00

Category theory was abstract, mathy, and difficult, but at least I wasn't losing money studying it.

This week we're learning game theory, and I've already lost fifty cents. Here's the game:

You need an odd number of people, each with fifty cents to bet. Each person has a tetrahedron (google it, ignorami) with the sides labeled m+ (for mutron), m- (for anti-mutron), e- (for electron), and e+ (for positron). For ten minutes, roll the tetrahedron and list the particles that land on the bottom. As you go along, m+ and m-cancel each other out when they land next to each other, and e- and e+ similarly cancel each other out. E.g. if you roll the sequence

m+, e-, m+, m-

the last two cancel, and it turns into

m+, e-.

Otherwise, the last roll is simply added onto to sequence. After ten minutes, stop and place your bets. Then do a final roll. Bet on whether most people's final roll will cancel out the previous roll in their sequence or will add onto the sequence.

How would you bet?

Pittsburgh Crepes

2009-06-11T18:06:00.002-06:00

Ditching class isn't nearly as satisfying when you don't really need to be there anyway and are, in fact, going to great lengths to stay in school long after the less academically motivated masses have fled.

But let me tell you, dear readers, that if there was a Crepes Parisiennes within walking distance of Mount Holyoke, I would ditch class every afternoon, and it would be very satisfying indeed.

Scary Things: A Partially Ordered Set

2009-06-09T21:21:00.005-06:00

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the planes that crash in the mountains are always the tiny planes. The ones with two tiny seats on either side of the tiny isle and propellers on the wings.

Waiting for just such a plane at the Islip airport Sunday, the fortyish other passengers and I eyed each other appraisingly, trying to guess who would live and who would be eaten. We made our final picks as we climbed the stairs that folded out of the side of the plane and saw where people were sitting. The scrappy man in a suit jacket was old but seated next to the emergency exit. He lives. The couple in the front row, definitely going through the windshield.

For an hour and a half, our seats vibrated like type-A massage chairs until the plane approximated landing by plunging and thrashing its way into Pittsburgh, and this is what I learned:

Tiny planes are a field trip to the llama farm compared with category theory.

Go to the Airport

2008-06-06T21:02:00.002-06:00

I like traveling, and I like airports. You can shop at the airport, eat greasy food, and hang out, waiting for something to happen. In many ways, going to the airport is like going to the mall. But airports are better for the following reasons:
1. You can sit on the floor.
2. You get to take your shoes off.
3. You can eat alone at a restaurant without fellow diners assuming you've been stood up by your date.
4. You can be fairly certain that no one is carrying a bomb.
That is why we should all spend more time in airports. Thank you.

SEX and the CITY

2008-05-31T17:31:00.005-06:00

I've been waiting for something of sufficient import to comprise the subject matter of my return to the "blog," but unfortunately "blogging" is like relationships in many ways, one of which is that you sometimes have to settle for a subpar subject. So.

I watched the Sex and the City movie this afternoon. I went for old time's sake, because I occasionally miss the vapid antics of my high school days, when I watched the show. Trae only made it to the scene where Mr. Big revealed Carrie's gigantic new closet, and all the girls in the theater gasped a simultaneous 'Woah.' He spent the rest of the movie in the mall bar, mourning the fall of western civilization, so I was on my own.

It was a bad movie. Obvioulsy. But even for a bad movie, it was bad. And it got me wondering what I, along with the sixty other twenty-something women in the movie theater, were doing watching a movie about the sex lives of forty-something women at four in the afternoon. Here's what I came up with:

As twenty-something women, it's important for us to feel like we'll always be this way. No matter how old we get, we'll always be sexy, smart, fashionable, and in the middle of some fabulously exciting romantic adventure. If we weren't able to believe this lie, we'd never have any fun. Who cares about designer shoes when you're confronting the inevitability of aging and death?

For years, while we were watching the show, Sex and the City helped us lie to ourselves. It helped us to believe that, twenty years in the future, we could be like Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte. And of course, anything farther in the future was beyond comprehension.

Sex and the City, the show, created a happy bubble of ignorance for it's viewers, and the movie shattered that bubble. When (SPOILER ALERT) Carrie married Mr. Big, it was all over. What can we imagine her doing now? What's left for Carrie? The movie ends with Carrie getting married, but the Sex and the City story ends with...

Carrie having sex with one man for the rest of her life, until age renders him impotent. He is too proud to admit to his problem, and she believes that her increasingly saggy posterior is the problem. When Carrie goes through menopause, she yells a lot, and Mr. Big wishes he'd stayed with his much younger third wife. When Mr. Big comes down with senile dementia, Carrie puts him in an assisted living facility and visits him every other week, until he forgets who she is. Samantha's cancer comes back, and she is the first to die. Then Miranda. Carrie gets knee replacements. She only wears sneakers with orthopedic inserts now, but sometimes she hobbles into her gigantic closet to look at all of the beautiful things she wore in her hayday around the turn of the century. On one such occasion, she trips over the tennis balls on the feet of her walker, falls, and is unable to get up. She dies, surrounded by her shoes, her beautiful babies, the loves of her life. Charlotte dies a week after Carrie's funeral, possibly of grief.

The last scene of the movie shows the four girls drinking their traditional cosmopolitans at Samantha's 50th birthday party. It's a feeble attempt at convincing us that things are really still the same. It's too late. By the end of the movie, we already know the truth. Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte are going to get ugly and die, and so are we. Sex and the City is not just a poorly written movie with insufficient character development and confusing transitions. It's an unwanted and unintentional reality check.

Thoughtless People

2008-04-04T11:12:00.003-06:00

This is why Descartes hid in his room to do philosophy:

If you go to class, you may be accosted by the sight of thoughtless fellow students who, having been poorly brought up, tote their boyfriends along to Philosophy 202 in the morning and who then allow their boyfriends, who are too obtuse to appreciate an opportunity to reflect upon the principle of sufficient reason or even the ontology of God, proceed to kiss the necks of these fellow students and engage in other less-than-appropriate displays of infatuation.

Events like this, which seem to occur oftener and oftener as spring approaches, make me think to myself 'How can this be the best of all possible worlds, if people are practically copulating at the table next to me while I'm trying to decipher Leibniz?' Then I feel bad for making an empirical argument. But seriously. What would Miss Manners say? I almost miss the days when Mt. Holyoke was a finishing school.

You may decide that I'm a prude. Those of you who have heard I'm considering writing my thesis on an etiquette-based defense of moral relativism probably already thought so. But answer me this: If I'm such a prude, why am I "blogging" about the personal lives of relative strangers?

My point is just that when you're sitting in your room next to the fireplace with no one but a ball of wax to talk to, being a rationalist is way easier.

LOST

2008-03-19T07:56:00.002-06:00

With midterms over, I hardly know what to do with myself, and this fact has led to the following realization:

Philosophy of Film has ruined internet TV for me. The last thing I want to be thinking about when I curl up in bed with my laptop to watch 'Cashmere Mafia' is what Hilary Putnam would have to say about Mia's makeout session with Zoe's manny*, but I can't seem to help it.

For the most part, it's clear that my shows are not trying to be philosophical, but watching 'Lost' last night, I realized that this is one show that not only tries to philosophize, it does nothing but philosophize. It beats you over the head with its philosophy, which goes something like this:

NOTHING makes ANY sense, and it's NEVER, EVER going to, because the WHOLE thing was POORLY thought out from the VERY beginning. NOTHING that happens is meaningful in any 'big picture' sort of way, because there IS NO big picture. There IS NO plan for what's going to happen next, and it's all a MEANINGLESS jumble of time-travel, polar bears, island-dwelling criminals, and SCARY INVISIBLE THINGS.

*man-nanny

Descartes Hears a Who

2008-02-21T10:27:00.005-07:00

Descartes wrote a proof ontological
That wasn't especially logical
His argument was circular
His death was tubercular*
And God still remains mythological

*Descartes died of pneumonia, not tuberculosis. I lied, but it was for the greater good of the limerick.

Many Happy Returns

2008-02-14T13:49:00.003-07:00

It's Valentine's Day again, folks, the holiday that brightens up the cold, gray, sleeting middle of February with roses and balloons and cards and pink teddy bears with magnetic kissy noses.

We intellectuals traditionally celebrate Valentine's day by being even more disgusted than usual by couples kissing in public, whining about how corporate America is bastardizing love, and generally hating the world. At first, this may seem like nothing more than an immature manifestation of the crippling envy we feel towards those whose lives are more than deep pits of loneliness and social anxiety, but that is not the case.

We actually do believe that we're (morally, spiritually, intellectually, and even physically, if we didn't have better things to do with our time than go to the gym) superior to public hand-holders, and we genuinely enjoy being bitter, so it's nice that Hallmark made a holiday for us.
Enjoy.

My Favorite Thing About BreathSavers

2008-02-13T16:44:00.003-07:00

My favorite thing about BreathSavers is the little blue indented bit in the middle. It's just the right size for the tip of your tongue.

"I don't know about rotting corpses, but we both like picnics."

2008-01-26T19:08:00.000-07:00

Mumsy is the winner of the first ever "blog" cartoon caption contest, and as such, she will be receiving the framed, signed original cartoon, along with a year of membership in "B"ARFO and the everlasting esteem of "blog" staff. Congratulations, Mumsy! You're wit and insight are unparalleled in the known universe.

Yet Another Coinkydink

2008-01-22T13:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I watched the episode of 'Dirty Jobs' where Mike Rowe learns how to tan hides at a tanning factory. While they are throwing the deer hides into a giant vat of something disgusting, Mike comments on the fact that one of the hides has hair on the wrong side and charmingly wonders aloud if perhaps he has discovered a new species of deer, one with the fur on the inside.

Then last night, I was in bed reading 'The Once and Future King', and I came across the following: "Said he was a wolf, only the difference was a wolf's skin was hairy on the outside, his on the inside."

Two references to animals with hair on the inside in one day? I wonder if the hair-on-the-inside wolves eat the hair-on-the-inside deer.

Macbook (hot) air

2008-01-18T00:07:00.000-07:00

The other day I was planning on buying a new laptop. Nothing fancy.. Something for writing, music organization, graphic design and maybe some cool internet abilities.
I was looking at MacBooks avoiding getting overconfident in my trendiness, as rumors began to reach my ears about "The Keynote" referring to Steve Jobs' special announcement of his latest products for Apple. It was sounding almost too Willy Wonka to handle as I toyed around with the iPhone like it was an everlasting gobstopper and the ipod touch like a fizzy lifting drink. I had to know what was coming out the next day. After an hour of trying to crack the employees (no water-boarding) I went to circuit city to see what they might have that apple would need to out-do.

I found what I considered the best notebook interface I'd ever seen! A swivel screen, tablet laptop with built in mp3, touchscreen, perf-mouse board, high speed, thumb print security light, small and.... It was running... Windows Vista. True I could have installed linux on it but none of the functions would work.
I began to daydream about the potential of running music software like Ableton live or Riesen on a touchscreen could revolutionize the art of live music.

Not to mention, make DJs the first to live in Star Trek.

So I had been counting some chickens...
What did we get? Macbook Potato Chip!
I am sure there are uses for a computer that ninjas can kill you with, but what does this mean for the world of electronica? well, nothing really, except that everyone will buy one of these and by the time they forget its in the chair and sit on it...
Hopefully my dream computer will be there to replace it after weeks of anticipation for Steves secret keynote with all the little oompa loompas.

Dispatches from the Rotner/Uhr Basement: 2.2

2008-01-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

I have two warts on my feet. They're either warts or something else, but I'm almost certain they're warts.

My stepmother says she thinks they're callouses, but I know that she knows they're warts. I also know that she thinks my warts are a direct result of my constant paranoid obsession with warts; I could see the judgmental glint in her eye as I pestered her to look more closely at my feet.

I'm sure you are all as appalled as I am by these recent developments, but let us endeavor to remain calm and rational, so that we can make it through this difficult time with as little disruption to our lives as possible.

I know you will all be praying for my speedy recovery, and as always, I appreciate your support.

A Publicly Transitory Misadventure with Sadie Hawkins: Part 2

2008-01-14T23:58:00.000-07:00

Having googled 'Sadie Hawkins,' I am almost too disappointed to relate the information to you.

It seems she was a character in the comic strip, Li'l Abner. Described as "the homeliest gal in all them hills," she was still a spinster at thirty-five, so her father, Hekzebiah Hawkins, gathered together all the bachelors of Dogpatch and said
"when ah fires- all o' yo' kin start a-runnin! When ah fires agin - after givin' yo' a fair start - Sadie starts a runnin'. Th' one she ketches'll be her husband."

That was the first Sadie Hawkins Day. Thereafter, it became an annual holiday in which all the spinsters of Dogpatch participated. The event has led to many real life traditions, such as the Sadie Hawkins dance. Whatever.

A Publicly Transitory Misadventure with Sadie Hawkins: Part 1

2008-01-14T23:15:00.000-07:00

Looking at them from the side, the numbers on the front of the bus looked like '206.' It wasn't until I was halfway to Gunbarrel that I figured out I was actually on the 205. Who knew subtracting 1 from the name of a bus could make such a big difference?

On the forty minute ride to the Gunbarrel shopping center and back, I had plenty of time to listen to the two high schoolers conversing awkwardly behind me. It went like this:

Boy: So you're a freshman?
Girl: Yeah.
Boy: Is everyone else mean to you?
Girl: Not really.
Boy: I'm always a total dick to the freshmen at my school.
Girl: (Tries to laugh.)
Boy: Does your school have a Sadie Hawkins dance?
Girl: No.
Boy: It's where the girls ask the boys to the dance. (Turns pink around the edges.)

At this point my mind wandered off, and I lost track of the conversation. Who was Sadie Hawkins? I wondered. Was she just a brazen hussy who foolishly asked a boy to a dance, unaware that her infamy would live on for more than fifty years after that unthinkable act was committed, or was she a shrewdly intelligent and vain seductress who, in a Hari Seldonesque display of prognostication, birthed a wicked scheme to get a dance named after her and have high schoolers mentioning her name long after she was too wrinkly and senilely tactless to attract an adequate dance partner? Or did she just not know that the boys are supposed to ask the girls?

Public Service Announcement

2008-01-14T23:01:00.000-07:00

Never, ever post an anonymous comment.How can I ask to borrow your Ouija board if I don't know who you are?

Dispatches from the Rotner/Uhr Basement: 2.1

2008-01-12T23:48:00.000-07:00

I'm painting a picture of the big red armchair in the living room. We got it from my stepmother's parents when they moved to Long Island. It's one of those iconic big red armchairs that would fit in better at 221 B Baker Street or that Inn at the beginning of 'The Turn of the Screw'. It's my favorite chair, but tonight I found out that Grandma Minna died in it.

Grandma Minna was my stepmother's father's mother. She was quite a character, and there are lots of stories about (and by) her floating around in the world. You've probably heard some of them. Anyway, she died in my chair, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.

My parents tried to make me feel better by saying it had been reupholstered, but minutes earlier they had also told me they'd never smoked pot, so who knows. Is there such a thing as haunted chairs? Maybe in painting the chair, I've also been unwittingly painting a postmortem portrait of the step-great-grandmother I've always been so curious about. Would it be insensitive to have a seance in the living room?

A Hat Rack is Not a Home

2008-01-11T23:57:00.000-07:00

This is why cliches do not reveal underlying truths about the world:
"You can never go home again," is a cliche,
and "Home is where you hang your hat," is a cliche,
but "You can never go where you hang your hat again," is stuff and nonsense.

What's Wrong with Overalls?

2008-01-10T22:18:00.000-07:00

I wasn't technically lying this afternoon when I responded to my friends' comments about my outfit with "It's laundry day." I did do laundry today, but the whole truth is that I only did one load, and there were plenty of other things I could have worn.

That's right, guys. I chose to wear overalls today.

My brown corduroy overalls are warm and comfy, and they have a big pocket in the front where I can put the things that I want to keep track of, like notebooks and pens and my phone and a Seattle's Best punch card and some Burt's Beeswax.

I like wearing overalls. Furthermore, I enjoy the words "y'all" and "reckon," and I like gettin' down to bluegrass, especially when someone's playing the spoons. But that doesn't mean I don't also enjoy Ian McEwan, Satie, and Jimmy Choos. Be as judgmental as you like, because I can find my nail clippers way faster than you.

But don't misconstrue this and think that, by wearing overalls, I'm trying to make a statement... like "I don't care what you think," or "I meditated for five hours before breakfast this morning, and my spirit guide told me my life would be more fulfilling if I gave up superficial conformist habits like dressing attractively."

The trouble with trying to subvert the dominant paradigm by dressing unfashionably or, for instance, getting an obscene, pus-excreting eyebrow piercing (you know who you are), is that, as a form of communication, it necessarily accepts the language of the dominant paradigm, reinforcing that which it attempts to destroy and blowing up in your face like a gigantic self-defeating bomb of suckiness.

One might get an eyebrow piercing in order to say "I'm a hardcore deviant punk," but the only reason one would expect it to say that is because, according to the dominant paradigm, a person with an eyebrow ring is a hardcore deviant punk.

Real radicals say "I'm a hardcore deviant punk" by hanging out at the mall, wearing Abercrombie hoodies and drinking grande vanilla lattes from Starbucks, because refusing to accept the language of the dominant paradigm is the only effective way to subvert it.

The overalls aren't saying that though. I just like them is all, and the point is... I'd appreciate it if you'd stop making fun of them, OK?

Coinkydink

2008-01-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

I was reading The Better of McSweeney's: Volume One while sitting in the car in the 45 minute waiting area at the airport last night and waiting for my family to get in from Puerto Vallarta. One of the stories in The Better of McSweeney's: Volume One is 'K is for Fake' by Jonathan Lethem. In the story, "The SciFi channel was in the course of a Twilight Zone marathon," which is interesting, because I recently watched a Twilight Zone marathon on the SciFi channel, and so did you, if you have any taste. It seems like an innocent coincidence, but is anything ever a coincidence in... The Twilight Zone?

The Zone

2007-12-31T20:18:00.000-07:00

The SciFi channel is now a little over twelve hours into a forty-eight hour Twilight Zone marathon.

From traveling to the future in a covered wagon to playing a game of pool with a dead man named Fats, the adventures with which Rod Serling accosts our brains possess a psychological and philosophical depth which seems at once obvious and just beyond the grasp of our conscious minds.

The epileptic cinematography and Shatneresque acting (not to mention Rod Serling's sexy narrating voice) which are so brilliantly displayed on the Twilight Zone distract us from the finer layers of meaning.

This forty-eight hour marathon is therefore the perfect opportunity to immerse ourselves in the Twilight Zone until our minds are so addled by freaky stories and sleep deprivation that we understand EVERYTHING.

So hurry up and start watching, because anyone who watches less than twenty-four consecutive hours of the Twilight Zone is a yellow turdurken.

The Great American Novel: Chapter 2

2007-12-31T00:07:00.000-07:00

You leap up towards the quickly vanishing spot of light which is the world and all OK things and reach for the top stair with your pink, grasping fingers. You clamber onto it as it sinks and from there lunge at the unmoving comb-like thingy that scrapes the grooves in the steps at the top of the escalator. Unfortunately it does not provide much to hold onto, so when Steve-o grabs your ankle and starts dragging you down, you immediately lose your grip and tumble down on top of him. Steve-o pulls his arm back to punch you, but you move your head, and his knuckles collide crunchingly with the stainless steel step your head had been on. You kick Steve-o in the face, and he topples over backwards into the dark, leaving a trail of spattered blood along the glass sides of the escalator. You turn and realize that the spot of light is almost invisible now. You run up the steps, taking two at a time, sweating all over the new Abercrombie t-shirt you just stole by putting it on in the dressing room under your Che Guavera t-shirt. As you near the top, a figure appears, holding out a hand towards you. Your eyes have not yet adjusted to the light, so it takes you several moments to realize that the figure is a zombie pirate.

If you would like to hope the zombie pirate is friendly and accept his help up, comment '1'.
If you would like to shoot the zombie pirate in the head with your laser gun, comment '2'.
If you would like to run back down the escalator like a yellow turdurken, comment '3'.

The Great American Novel

2007-12-29T22:14:00.000-07:00

Your Sketchered feet patter nervously down the over-waxed hardwood floor connecting Nordstrom Rack to Pottery Barn to Orange Julius to Macy's, weaving your way through loud clumps of post-Christmas shoppers.
"We shouldn't come to the mall on weekends," you mutter. "It's like we're sardines, only sardines that are still alive when they get stuffed in their tin, so they can smell each other." Frank Sinatra's disembodied voice comes at you out of a speaker, melodically advising you that you'd better watch out, not cry, and not pout, which might sound less threatening coming from someone who's still alive.
"What else would we do?" asks Steve-o.
"We could write the great American novel or something," you suggest.
"What would it be about?"
"About life, about...people hanging out at the mall."
"We'll do that next weekend," says Steve-o. "Let's go get a cookie." You and Steve-o turn a corner and step onto an escalator, which descends forever into a thick black slough of despondent, soul-eating Capitalism.

If you would like to try running up the escalator, comment "1". If you would like to continue down, comment "2".

Writing in Food

2007-12-18T13:03:00.000-07:00

Welcome back to Writing in Food. We're very excited about this next episode. It's called 'Apple my Apple,' and we think you'll enjoy it's commentary on the relationship between nature and technology. Be sure to join us next time when we explore the perversely subverted spiritual lives of suburban housewives as expressed through their experimental postmodern photojournalism.

Writing in Food

2007-12-18T06:25:00.000-07:00

Hello, and welcome to Writing in Food. Today's installment is called 'Play for me, banana.' Enjoy.

Dispatches from the Buckland Common Room: 1.1

2007-12-16T22:36:00.000-07:00

At Mount Holyoke, finals come in manila envelopes. Once you've fought your way to the counter where you pick up your final, you take it to a designated testing room, remove it from its envelope, and spend three hours writing your answers in a bluebook. Then you put your test and your bluebook back into the envelope, seal the envelope, and sign it.

I was informed before taking my Art History* final yesterday that not licking and sealing your envelope while you're still inside the designated testing room is a violation of the honor code. I might just be confused due to the fact that my brain is sleep-deprived, over caffeinated, and fed only on what I've been able to steal from the Buckland kitchen, but this seems like a blatant abuse of the power given to honor code legislators.

The honor code exists, because Mount Holyoke has self-scheduled exams, and it would be easy for us to cheat if we weren't guilt tripped out of doing so. It would be reasonable to say "If you don't lick and seal your envelope while still inside the designated testing room, we will assume that you have been cheating, which is a violation of the honor code," but I don't see how failing to lick and seal your envelope in the testing room is, in itself, detrimental to the community. Turning irrelevant actions into violations of the honor code undermines whatever legitimacy the honor code may have.

*Taking an Art History exam, as it turns out, is much like being a psychic. You do well by making statements that sound specific but are general enough to apply to anything. For example, "Vermeer lived during an historical period in which artists were reexamining the role that art and the interpretation of art should play in people's lives," or "Caravaggio painted his figures with expressive hand gestures in order to draw the viewer's focus to the emotion of the story," or "Breugel was painting at a time when technological advancement brought economic pressures into conflict with traditional values."

Ethical Dilemma

2007-12-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

I've got a hypothetical scenario I'd like the readers of this blog to contemplate. To give credit where credit is due I'll admit that I got the idea from an episode of Boston Legal. Who knew William Shatner could actually act. The problem is as follows:
Suppose you are the director of a medical research laboratory that is working on potentially life saving cancer treatments. Feeling short staffed you decide to add an entry level position for qualified applicants. During an interview with a perspective employee it comes out that he is a devout scientologist who is active in his faith. He believes that human suffering is caused by the presence of alien souls within the human body, and that this is the result of a tyranny perpetrated by the ancient leader of the galactic federation lord xenu.
Clearly his personal beliefs stand well outside the boundaries of scientific logic, and are contingent upon unreasonable assumptions and conclusions. Furthermore if he were to be employed a similar fault in his logic could result in delaying the release of a potentially life saving drug, or some other problem. As an alternative there is a slightly less qualified candidate who is an atheist. Is it permissible to deny him employment even though it could be considered religious discrimination, on the grounds that his beliefs indicate that he is either unable or unwilling (at least in one aspect of his life) to conform to the rules of inquiry required by his job?

Note: I'm not asking about the legality of this action.

Enemies of Richard Dawkins

2007-12-12T14:34:00.000-07:00

Richard Dawkins seems like a man who has never had to work hard to survive. He gets paid to speculate and perpetuate basic facts while brewing his opinions. He has been well sheltered by education based reality for so long, he is bitterly confused and frightened by outside concepts and belief systems labeling them as "enemies."

I would not suggest he is wrong, but he has believed he is always right for so long - EVERYONE is wrong to him. Therefore to curtail the surfacing discomfort of not knowing how certain things work, he is set on missions to prove they don't work. The problem is regardless of whether or not they work for him, people need them.

There are in fact, of course, ailments modern medicines have been unsuccessful at curing. Not to mention the many thousands of conditions which change lives post surgery or post therapy. These conditions can only be comforted - not cured and therefore call for alternative programs or "superstitions" To ease the pain of everyday life. So how painful does it get? Heres the latest Opiate.

The medical industry can't help everyone. That would be a monopoly.

Dispatches From the Buckland Basement: 1.9

2007-12-10T21:37:00.000-07:00

The snow that was covering the grass has turned to ice, and the future Yale Law students have moved into the library with their sleeping bags and pillows to study without the inconvenience of walking back to their beds at night. They won't eat or shower for a week and a half, so it's important to get your books now, before they start to smell. It's finals season again, that time of year when the Mount Holyoke library becomes a refugee camp with an unusually high ratio of Chanel earrings to refugees.

Dean Bowie was missed by the Philosophy department at their meeting this afternoon, and shortly after the meeting ended, his absence was explained. It seems the first finals-related death of the season occurred this morning in one of the Rockefeller dorms. While students have not been informed of the events which caused the young woman's death, they are a well-educated collection of people and are likely aware that twenty-two year olds do not often die of heart attacks.

It gives one pause to witness the self-inflicted degradation of one's fellow students. It may even cause one to wonder if all of this is necessary. But those thoughts are quickly chased from one's mind by the immediate concerns of research not yet conducted, papers not yet edited, and dates not yet memorized, not to mention the irrefutable knowledge that not getting an A in Art History means you have no future.

Perhaps this culture of panic is purposefully cultivated, or maybe it arises organically from our desire for purpose and direction. Either way, it's a culture one must embrace, at least during finals season, in order to succeed in the ivy-covered world of Mount Holyoke.

Cartoon Caption Contest

2007-12-07T00:44:00.001-07:00

Submission Guidelines:
Captions may be any length.
You may submit as many captions as you like.
They must be submitted as comments.
No anonymous captions will be accepted.
Bubbles count as captions, but you must specify who is talking/thinking.
Good luck!

Four Kinds of People

2007-12-06T17:48:00.000-07:00

Mount Holyokers can be organized into four groups according to two determining factors: Whether they are rich and whether they were spawned by intellectuals. We can represent this system of grouping as a doubly bisected square (see figure 1.1).

The top left quadrant (quadrant 1) represents those individuals who are rich and were spawned by intellectuals. The top right quadrant (quadrant 2) represents those who are not rich and were spawned by intellectuals. The bottom left quadrant (quadrant 3) represents those who are rich and were not spawned by intellectuals, and finally, the bottom right quadrant (quadrant 4) represents those who are not rich and were not spawned by intellectuals.

Figure 1.1

................Rich............................Not Rich...........

Spawned by Intellectuals

Not Spawned by Intellectuals

We can go about determining which quadrant particular people fall into by watching a documentary with them and noting how they respond.

Members of Quadrant 1 will say something like "They should have found a better camera guy. The part where those people were trying to get away from the police was really shaky. Why were they running away again?"

Members of Quadrant 2 will respond with something more like "It sucked when the police were mowing down protesters in the streets and then indiscriminately shooting people. You can't have a functioning democracy without free speech."

Members of Quadrant 3 will say "I've never seen a movie like that. How did they get it to look like it was actually happening?"

Members of Quadrant 4 will say "It was good."

Nina is the Pink Block

2007-12-05T06:12:00.000-07:00

And here are three alternative captions for that cartoon:

"Nina sometimes wondered if God was playing games with her."

"Nina briefly experienced a falling sensation."

"Nina was beginning to wonder whether her life had any real meaning or was just an inevitable descent into predetermined conformity."

And another bit of news along those lines is that the "blog" will soon hold its first biweekly "blog" cartoon caption contest. Put on your luckiest captioning cap, because everyone must enter. I will not choose a winner until I have at least three entries.

The top three reasons intelligent people prefer the "blog" cartoon caption contest to the "New Yorker" cartoon caption contest:

Your caption does not have to be something one of the characters is saying.

Selection of the winning caption does not involve democracy in any way, shape, or form (we're classier than American Idol).

Unlike the "New Yorker", the "blog" has never endorsed the heinous and subversive act of reading of an abridged edition of Moby Dick.

I mean it about entering captions, you guys. We at the "blog" may regard democracy as a failed experiment based on the naive assumption that people are competent enough to tell what's in their best interest, but this whole competition thing won't float without your participation. For that reason I will suck up condescendingly as such:
We at "The Essential Works of Julia Uhr" feel that it has been too long since we thanked our valued readers for their ongoing support, without which we would have no reason to do what we do. In a world full of blogs on every subject, by every crackpot on unemployment, you have proven the quality of your character and taste by choosing to read this blog. It is your dedication that keeps us from giving up and hurling ourselves into the abyss of studying for finals. We thank you from the bottoms of our hearts and hope you will continue to enjoy "The Essential Works of Julia Uhr" for years to come.

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

2007-12-05T01:56:00.001-07:00

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

2007-12-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

Feminism: Part 1

2007-12-03T09:42:00.000-07:00

Another week has passed. Another crepe day has meandered its chocolatey way into history. The last of the clingy brown leaves have been pummeled out of the trees by chunks of ice which are still raining down out of a white South Hadley sky.

On mitten-inducing days like this, Mount Holyokers are rarely seen outside, and only the most attentive of peoplewatchers will spot one in an 8:35 class. Nevertheless, a motivated few existentialists were able to drag their cold, sleepy brains into Skinner 116 this morning to discuss the beginning of Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex."

Professor Wartenberg began the discussion by asking the feminists in the class to raise their hands. About half the ladies in the class nervously put their manicured mitts in the air, looked around quickly, then averted their eyes so as not to be called upon to respond to the inevitable "why?"

So Professor Wartenberg instead turned to the lowered-handed half, who talked about the negative implications of the word 'feminism.' Some people didn't want to identify themselves as feminists, because they didn't want people to think they hated men. Some had concluded that feminism was simply not relevant anymore, and several more just didn't like the idea of putting themselves in a box by identifying with a group; Hell is other people, after all, and no one wants to be stuck in a feminist Hell box.

It's all good and well to discuss problems with the implications of 'feminism,' but what about the alternative? What are the implications of 'not-feminism'? This is one of the questions we will address in "Feminism: Part 2," so stay tuned.

Post 100

2007-12-01T02:11:00.000-07:00

The blog entitled "The Essential Works of Julia Uhr," formerly known as "The Essential Works of Julia Uhr and Micheal King," has, since its inception in August 2007, amazed and inspired readers with a unique combination of academic rigor and witty realism.

From the second post, "Save the Straws," which examined the most serious but least talked about implications of America's depleting oil supply, to the eighty-ninth post, "The Batchelor," which discussed interpersonal psychology in reality TV, Ms. Uhr has fearlessly tackled the toughest problems of our age.

But historians will surely agree that no post better embodies the spirit of "The Essential Works of Julia Uhr" better than the hundredth post, "Post 100." With a degree of narcissism which would be repellent if presented by a less personable writer, "post 100" glowingly reviews the blog and "Post 100" itself.

This self-referential piece of literary ingenuity is the perfect example of Ms. Uhr's writerly cunning. There is no doubt in this reporter's mind that Julia Uhr is one of her generation's greatest assets. I highly recommend her work to anyone interested in hearing the blogosphere's new voice of truth, intelligence, and style.

Cave Monks

2007-11-30T23:51:00.000-07:00

In Georgia, I visited some monks. They live in the Caucasus Mountains, which look like this:
Fifteen hundred years ago, they lived in caves that look like this:
With paintings on the walls like this:
And this:
Now their monastery looks like this:
They're still living in the same place and still using many of the caves that their predecessor cave monks dug into the side of the mountain centuries ago. They have a windmill now for electricity, but still. It takes gumption. Georgia cave monks must eat a lot of buttermilk biscuits.

2 Vast 2 Spurious

2007-11-30T21:53:00.000-07:00

When I am a senior, I will write an honors thesis. I will call it
"2 Vast 2 Spurious: A Postmodern Feminist Critique of Objectivism in an Absurdist Paradigm." I will make you read it. Then I will make you tell me what you thought.
HA!

Bangs 2

2007-11-30T21:42:00.001-07:00

This is a picture of my bangs for those of you who expressed curiosity about them. They weren't in my eyes when I first cut them, but now they are.

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

2007-11-30T21:28:00.000-07:00

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

2007-11-30T21:13:00.000-07:00

Well done

2007-11-30T19:51:00.001-07:00

I was recently at The Attic a nice old bar with a familiar smell and shape to it. It was Monday night and they always have five dollar burgers on Monday night (for future reference.) I often order burgers well done because it is fun to say, but my order came back to be RARE! Now this was not infuriating can't complain about a 3 dollar price break. What occurred to me was that this always happens. Every Restaurant at which I order my burger well done, comes back rare. This to me calls for a name change, why do they even call it rare, let's call it common or not-done. It is definitely not rare. On a brighter note Stephen Colberts new book is out I Am America: And So Can You in which he adequately demonstrates abundant stupidites throughout our great nation.
including but not limited to:
The family, old people, animals, religion, sports, sex & dating, homosexuals, higher education, hollywood, the media, class wars, race, immigrants and science.
proving things are really only as funny as you can make them...
He makes them hilarious.

Dispatches From the Buckland Basement: 1.8

2007-11-27T22:08:00.000-07:00

There will soon come a time in your innocent little life, dear reader, when you will have to make a very important decision.

You will be spending your Thanksgiving break at MIT, eating turkey cooked by geeks and cranberries out of a can. You will be planning on taking the bus back to your own school on Sunday night, being conscientiously terrified of the possibility of missing a single one of your Monday morning classes. You will compact all of your clothes and books back into your big grey duffel bag. You will check under the bed. You will make sure that you aren't forgetting your toothbrush.

And then, dear reader, something will be brought to your attention. This will happen purely by accident, but it will put an unapologetic kink in the hectically unexamined life you have been leading over the course of the fall semester.

You will happen to spy, dear readers, a flier for a talk that Noam Chomsky is giving on Tuesday. Your sweet little heart will leap with anticipation as you imagine seeing your favorite lefty linguist in person and listening to him talk with your effervescent admiration unimpeded by the intermediary of National Public Radio.

Immediately thereafter, your poor fickle heart will drop, as you imagine Professor Wartenberg's face scrunching unnaturally with frustration and disappointment while he asks you why you missed two days of class.

This will possibly be, dear reader, the most difficult decision you will have ever been faced with. You will learn for the first time that your professors and the things that your professors profess are not the same. Your professors are not simply embodiments of knowledge. They are not just the sum total of the ideas that they impart to you. Your professors are people with feelings that get hurt when you ditch class or turn in a stupid paper or make fun of their plaid jacket behind their back. And this will be the time when you must choose between the professors and the ideas.

Professor Wartenberg tells you that you are always free, whether you want to be or not, and that doing things simply because it's what other people want or expect is a pathetic way to go about living your life. He also tells you that, by confronting the fact that you're going to die, possibly soon, you can lead an authentic life. But what Professor Wartenberg wants, dear reader, is for you to get to his Existentialism class every Monday and Wednesday morning at or before 8:35, turn in a five-to-seven page-double-spaced-twelve-point-font-paper every now and then, and not make too much noise, because it's early.

He does not care whether you become fully conscious of the freedom you inherently possess as a human being. He does not care whether you live an authentic life. He does, however, decide what your grade will be at the end of the semester. And you will have to decide for yourself how much that matters to you, because sometimes the unfortunate truth is that getting an A in Existentialism and being a good Existentialist are mutually exclusive eventualities.

I'm sorry that life is so full of hard choices, dear reader. If I could make it easier for you, I would. If I could help you choose, I would do that too, but this choice will be essentially and necessarily yours. I just thought you ought to be warned.

Turkeys

2007-11-24T23:53:00.000-07:00

As some of you may be aware an American holiday widely known as "Thanksgiving" occurred recently. It consists of an annual systematic genocide of the countries turkey population and the use of other agricultural abundances during this season. Well, thanks to our brave democracy in the wonderful United States our leader, the President proudly looked past tradition and allowed two turkeys to live. Yes, President Bush in his kindness and loving nature Pardoned two turkeys before thanksgiving so they would not be condemned to the fate of the rest of their families. Hopefully no one saw that while they were sitting in prison.
Well, too bad - C.B.S. ran the story for two hours straight and just happens to be one of the only channels allowed in most prisons. I felt this was worth mentioning because a friend of mine missed his Thanksgiving dinner to watch this in Jail after getting arrested for violating a court order which outlawed the action of feeding people who live in trees to protest their logging.
Yes, searched and arrested for allegedly feeding people.
Almost a violation of the fourth amendment. Oh right, the fourth amendment was practically nullified in 2001 when the USA Patriot Act went through congress in a matter of hours.

Imagine how many people are being put in prison or killed right now for being "suspected terrorists" due to their ethnic background or anti-authoritarian behavior.
Democracy truly prevails and "the decider" wins again as these wonderful Turkeys survive another Thanksgiving and the death toll rises in the middle east.

Call your congressmen.

So Juvenile and Definitely Not about Economics

2007-11-20T15:56:00.000-07:00

A hooker was walking with Superman
Through a rain-spattered Paris one day.
Superman said "You got time for a lay?"
She said "This time, you've got to pay.

You didn't last week
Or the month before that,
And the phone company canceled my service today.
I have children to feed, bills to pay,
And on top of everything
My boyfriend decided he's gay."

Superman let out a sigh
As she tried not to cry.
Then she screamed in alarm
For he'd zapped off her arm
With a laser from out of his eye.

Things Teenagers Do

2007-11-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

1) Run around in the snow wearing flipflops and little shorts that say stuff on the butt.

2) Fight with their parents.

3) Experiment with their sexuality.

4) Dye their hair funky colors.

5) Read The Catcher in the Rye.

6) Contemplate the sheer awesomeness of being them.

7) Get all angsty about how maybe life is meaningless and nothing matters and they aren't the awesomest thing in the universe after all, then realize they are thinking very deep thoughts which no one else thinks, because everyone besides them is shallow and stupid.

8) Contemplate the awesomeness of being them.

9) Watch Mean Girls.

Now let's see how many of these I can get done before midnight, when my ontological state shifts from that of being-nominally-a-teenager to that of being-nominally-an-adult.

The Bachelor

2007-11-19T23:58:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago, I had a dream that I was on ABC's reality dating show, The Bachelor. Coincidentally, the season finale of The Bachelor was on tonight, so I decided to watch it. It was just about the saddest darn thing I ever saw. For those of you who haven't been keeping up with the show, here's what happened:

After six weeks, Brad Womack has narrowed down his group of twenty-five bachelorettes to the final two, Jenni and DeAnna. They are both conventionally attractive brunettes who've had nothing better to do with the past six weeks than humiliate themselves on cable, so it's no surprise that Brad, our handsome Texas millionaire, is having so much trouble choosing one of them. We're just impressed that he can tell them apart!
Brad goes on a final date with each woman. DeAnna makes him dinner and then tells him she's falling in love with him. Then Jenni makes him dinner and tells him she's falling in love with him. Brad goes shopping for an engagement ring. Who will he pick?
We think our curiosity is about to be sated, as Brad stands on top of a decorative lump of concrete on a grassy hill with the final rose laying on a tiny corinthian column next to him. Jenni gets out of a limo and walks up to him. We hold our breath. He says some nice things about her, and then...he dumps her! She walks off in tears.
DeAnna gets out of the limo and walks up to him. He says some nice things about her and tells her he dumped Jenni. DeAnna's eyes glow with vicious triumph, and then... Brad walks off! He paces and walks around in circles. He comes back to DeAnna and... tells her he doesn't love her!

Poor Brad. Poor Bachelorettes. So many tears. After six weeks, he has not been able to decide who he wants to spend the rest of his life with. If reality TV can't find his soul mate for him, I'm afraid Brad is doomed to die alone. But the question on all our minds is surely... will Brad be back for the next season of The Bachelor?

Metacookie

2007-11-19T22:12:00.000-07:00

I ate an oreo cookie today, but it wasn't like a normal oreo cookie. Someone mashed up a bunch of oreos, made cookie dough out of them, and baked it into cookies. Then I ate one. It was awesome.

Philosophy Day

2007-11-18T10:06:00.000-07:00

I know Philosophy day was supposed to be Thursday, but I've had all these papers and registration times and roommate mediations. I know you're disappointed, but I'll try to make it up to you. Today, instead of telling you about one philosophy major, I'll do two!

It might not seem at first like David Duchovny and Pope John Paul II have much in common. David Duchovny is the sexy star of The X-Files, and Pope John Paul II is dead. However upon closer examination, they may be more alike than we all suspected.

David Duchovny was born in New York City in 1960. As an undergrad, he majored in Philosophy at Princeton and wrote his senior thesis on The Schizophrenic Critique of Pure Reason in Beckett's Early Novels. He went on to Yale for a Master's in English Literature, and he started work on a PhD that he never finished. Tragically, in 1997, he married Tea Leoni and proceeded to have two children with her. He named his second child Kyd, and his filmography includes such classic as Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead and Space: Above and Beyond.

Pope John Paul II was born in 1920 in Poland. According to CNN, he may have been the only pope to have his life portrayed in a comic book. He went to Krakow to study Philosophy and Literature at Jagiellonian University in 1938. He also joined an experimental theater troupe. In spite of the Nazi occupation, he managed to get two MAs and even finish his doctorate. During his reign as Pope, he was known for speaking against Communism, kissing babies, and canonizing people like he was running out of saints.

So you see? Philosophy majors are really all the same. Happy Philosophy Day!

My Week So Far

2007-11-14T15:12:00.000-07:00

Me: Shoo bee doo wapiddy bee doo bee shoo bee doo wap.
Roommate: Die die die!
Me: Yikes!
Professor W___: You must confront the inevitability of your death in order to live an authentic life. I should have been a physicist.
Heidegger: Hyphen hyphen hyphen.
Me: What should I do with my life?
Karl Marx: Exchange value and the fetishism of commodities and variable capital and ROBOTS!
Professor W___: Would you ask a marker what it wants to be when it grows up? No. That's because it's essence precedes its existence.
Me: No, professor W___ , I wouldn't ask a marker what it wants to be when it grows up, because I don't talk to markers.
Heidegger: Hyphen hyphen hyphen.

Defensive

2007-11-13T18:22:00.000-07:00

I don't care what anyone says. 'Beauty and the Geek' is a classy, intelligent, and entertaining show with psychological depth up the wazoo. However, if the next season doesn't have female geeks, I'm going to stop watching.

Also, the day after tomorrow is the penultimate Thursday of the month, and I'm sure you all remember what that means...Philosophy Day! Tune in to find out which Philosophy major we will be honoring for November.

WWMMD?

2007-11-11T00:39:00.001-07:00

A very wise person once told me that eating salad with your fingers does not conform to the standards of common etiquette, and it is with this stinging critique in mind that I have formulated today's "B"RFO question. If you are the first person to answer correctly, you will be entitled to a gold star (ten gold stars are redeemable for an all-expenses-paid cruise to the Caribbean) and a free one year membership to "B"RFO. So with no further ado, the question is...

If a train traveling east at sixty miles per hour collides with a train traveling west at twenty-two miles per hour, which fork does Miss Manners use to eat her first course at dinner?

Paranoia

2007-11-09T23:47:00.000-07:00

I think I'm succumbing to paranoia
Last night I was chased by a giant sequoia
This morning a fellow named Montoya
Followed me, hiding behind an uprooted soya

So distressed was I that I moved to Nagoya
Where we all rolled over and one fell off
There were seven thousand, two hundred, and eleven on the bed
And we all yelled
"Salt, salt, salt," at Jimmy Buffet, because he's old
The scene was immortalized in a painting by Goya

Excerpt

2007-11-09T05:43:00.000-07:00

NaNoWriMo takes a quantity over quality approach to writing. You simply won't have time to finish your 50,000 words in 30 days if you think about what you're writing as you go along. Trying to cram as many words as possible into as little time as possible leads some people to write sentences like this:

One day, Oliver, the strongest and sweetest cup of Earl Grey tea to have recently returned from the dead, was meditating in his favorite spot on his favorite tuft of grass under his favorite cork tree next to his favorite chrysanthemum, and the world, if he had been thinking about it instead of meditating, would have seemed very nice indeed, when all of a sudden his meditation, because he must not have been meditating very hard after all, was interrupted by a biscuit, the English kind that’s actually a cookie, grazing its way over to him through the clump of flowering bushes that framed the front of his hermit-cave so prettily.

I just thought you all might like to know that my NaNo is progressing slowly and disjointedly. It's day 9, and I'm already 4000 words behind, so I hope you feel better about yourselves, knowing that even my superior awesomeness falls short of perfection.

Having Just Watched 'Stranger than Fiction'

2007-11-07T21:42:00.000-07:00

I can be your auditor
And you can be be auditee
I'll take you where we'll be alone
To muse over the oddity

Of how new skis relate to work
Or why the Gap's a charity
Of how your eyes are cute and blue
Or the fetishism of my commodity

When my buddies at the IRS
Threaten to tell my boss on me
I'll stick your receipts right up their ass
And yell something vaguely obscene about how professionalism
is overrated

Revelation

2007-11-07T20:56:00.000-07:00

Nicole Richie's father is black!?!

Disclaimer

2007-11-07T14:33:00.000-07:00

The opinions and mathematical calculations expressed on the "blog" are solely those of the individual contributor and do not reflect the opinions or mathematical calculations of the "blog" or its affiliates.

post 100

2007-11-07T10:16:00.000-07:00

There is nothing wrong with the mercury content of fish these days, it's all in your perception really.
The other day I ate enough sushi to accurately tell the temperature.

Thought I had more to say but nothing lives up to the fact that we have accomplished a mile marker of 100 posts!

With that said we would like to thank and coongratulate all of the loving participants for the persistence and consideration toward reading this blog and we hope to bring you more of the same quality you expect and deserve.

As a tribute to this special occasion we ask our readers to comment with any hopes or concerns about this already highly acclaimed on-line series.

Thank you for participating and thank you for reading;
The Essential Works of Julia Uhr and Michael King

sincerely,
Maya Dentity

Massachusetts

2007-11-06T05:58:00.000-07:00

One thing I've learned about Massachusetts is how it's spelled. Another thing I've learned is that, when it rains in Massachusetts, it pours, and when it pours, your roommate makes you go out in the rain to buy new sheets, because yours got stolen from summer storage, and you've been using her extra ones, which she now wants back, even though she still hasn't given you that sixty bucks you loaned her like two months ago.

Furthermore, I'm working on a fairly self-contained chunk of The Pirate's Wench right now, so you can look forward to reading that in the next couple of days. However, I feel I should warn you before hand that there is no sex. There is no groping, licking, ogling, or footsie playing. There is also no underage alcohol consumption, smoking, or il/licit use of controlled substances.
You needn't be too disappointed though, because there is a bit of dancing. If you're the parents from Footloose, it'll definitely get you riled up.

It's Guy Fawkes Day, and the Pope is Still Dead.

2007-11-05T08:28:00.000-07:00

Remember remember the fifth of November
The day when I gave myself bangs
Because I'd rather dismember
A kitten in a blender
Than listen to pseudo-phrenological harangues

Since Democracy is Clearly Overrated...

2007-11-04T01:06:00.000-06:00

I decided to go with The Pirate's Wench: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Romance. But don't stick your fingers in your mouths and pretend to gag yet. I registered it as a genre novel in the 'thriller/horror' category. To prove that my novel is not in any way mushy, here is the ending to one of the stories:

“Fuck those misleading ass holes on the Discovery Channel’s original series, Myth Busters!” You yell as your life drains out of the hole in the top of your head, percolates through your hair, and oozes into the dirt where it leeches into the ground water to be consumed by everyone who doesn’t filter their tap water.

Monogamy and Rodentia

2007-11-04T00:44:00.000-06:00

It occurs to me that if you are reading this, chances are you are already disappointed, because I am not Julia. Coincidentally, me too. However, I thought I'd share with you some of the epic knowledge bestowed unto me through the magical lesson vessel some of you may identify as the television. I call it professor.
It was after nine o'clock and I was late for my lecture on the animated future, when the Discovery channel interrupted with cute footage of beavers.
Here are some gems of knowledge I feel necessary to pass on:

Beavers are included in a surprising 3% of all mammals which remain with a single mate through out life. (no humans are not members)

Beavers are 2nd to Human in environment manipulation, and often compete for the opportunity. Damming drainage tubes and flooding sidewalks among other methods of letting us know they are still here (necessary).

Their front teeth never stop growing.

They produce oils for the purpose of waterproofing and marine-dynamics.

In conclusion Beavers are natural wonders and marvelous example of evolutions better accomplishments.

This Star is Dedicated to Hargobind.

2007-11-02T19:16:00.001-06:00

Another Chance to Win

2007-11-02T14:28:00.000-06:00

The first person who can come up with a good explanation of why this argument is wrong will win a gold star and a free "B"RFO membership:

If horrible events, like the Holocaust, lead a person to believe that the world is absurd and meaningless, it would be silly for that person to commit suicide for that reason, because by doing so, he would be saying that living in an absurd and meaningless world means that life is not worth living. If life is not worth living, horrible events, like the Holocaust, would not be depriving their victims of anything worthwhile by killing them, and horrible events, like the Holocaust, would therefore not be so bad after all, and he would have no good basis for the opinion that the world is absurd and meaningless.

Something Important

2007-10-31T17:59:00.000-06:00

Dear Readers,

There's something important that I need to talk to you about.

It's not that Michael and I don't love each other. We just can't write the "blog" together anymore. The most important thing for you to know is that we both love you very much, and we're going to try to make this transition as easy as possible. We know it's important for you to read both of your bloggers, so Michael will get his own blog, and you can read it every other weekend. I know this all seems strange right now, and you have every right to be upset, but we're still a family, and I promise we're going to make this work.

And one other thing.
Maya Dentity will be writing some posts for the "blog" now. He's not trying to replace Michael; he knows that no one could ever replace Michael in your lives, but he hopes that you will find a new place in your hearts for him. Maya is an important person to me, and even though things are confusing right now, I hope you can at least give him a chance.

I think this talk went really well, and you can ask me if you have any questions. I love you guys, and no matter what happens, we're going to stick together. Just without Michael.

My NaNo

2007-10-31T14:47:00.000-06:00

I've narrowed down my list of possible NaNos to Wri for NaNoWriMo. The three finalists are...

1) 'Shrek 4,' a screenplay for the exciting new installment in which Fiona is sentenced to death by lethal injection for performing inhumane experiments on Puss-n-Boots in the name of theoretical physics, and Donkey sings a snappy tune called 'I Have Mixed Feelings about the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical.'

2) 'The Pirate's Wench,' a postmodern choose-your-own-adventure romance.

3) 'Gossip and Lies,' an annotated Venn diagram, based on a sixteen-year-old girl's disillusioning but fashion-conscious experience of being popular at prep school.

Help me complete step 1 of Operation Harpoon by posting a comment to vote on your favorite NaNo.

November

2007-10-31T13:47:00.000-06:00

As I'm sure you are all aware, November is National Talk Like a Robot Month. I don't know anything about that. I don't intend to talk like a robot during the month of November or any other month, and I don't understand what would compel others to do so; National Talk Like a Robot Month does not even have a pronounceable acronym.

More importantly, November is also NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). My previous encounters with NaNoWriMo have not been what one might call fulfilling; Two years ago, I wrote an interesting absurdist play but failed to complete my 50,000 words. Last year, I didn't even try.

This year, however, things are going to be different. I may never have a law school diploma hanging on the wall of my office, but I'm damn well going to settle for having a NaNoWriMo certificate of novel-completion taped to the inside of my cardboard box.

In order to ensure that I accomplish my goal this year, I have scientifically developed a plan for success, which I am sharing with you, my loyal readers, in the hope that your novels too may benefit from my wisdom:

1) Find a story.
2) Find characters.
3) Hunt the certificate to the ends of the earth and harpoon it until it spouts black blood and rolls fin out.

I hope you find it helpful. NaNoWriMo starts at midnight, so good luck!

And the Winner is...

2007-10-30T15:47:00.000-06:00

John Uhr!
Congratulations, John. You correctly answered the "blog's" LSAT practice question. Please accept this gold star as a symbol of our highest regard.
You have now joined the ranks of "Blog" Readers of the First Order, or "B"RFO, and the "blog" staff would like to remind you that with great power comes great responsibility.
Nice work, John... And for those of you who did not win, stay tuned for more opportunities to earn gold stars and join "B"RFO.

* * *

In other news, I found a book in the Library called "The Unpublished Works of Friedrich Nietzsche." Is the title implying that the book's existence precedes its essence by alluding to Sartre's notion of being what it is not and not being what it is, or does someone need to buy the Stanford University Press a dictionary?

A Note To Firtsies Everywhere:

2007-10-29T21:34:00.000-06:00

Kissing in a library is exactly the same as smacking someone's ass in a church. Just keep that in mind.

Because the "Blog" isn't Emo Enough Already...

2007-10-29T15:59:00.000-06:00

I know I said I was going to let y'all know what my LSAT practice test score was when I got it, but I just don't want to talk about it right now, so deal. I'll be crying in my room, if anyone needs me, which I'm sure they won't, because I don't have any friends, because I can't do logic.

New Rule

2007-10-29T12:46:00.000-06:00

People who answer the questions anonymously are automatically disqualified to receive special smiley faces, gold stars, and any other "blog" prizes that the "blog" awards to readers, defined as people who read the "blog" and also have names.

The Real-World Applications of Existentialism

2007-10-29T08:06:00.000-06:00

I took a practice LSAT yesterday. Four hours of trying to answer illogical questions with logic. Being a Philosophy professor is looking better every day. The highlight of the test, however, was a question I'd like to share with you:

If human beings attempt to understand their lives, then they will be faced with certain unanswerable questions. That will lead them to admit the uncertainty underlying all things. If they make that admission, they will conclude that their lives are necessarily without meaning. Thus, if human beings attempt to understand their lives, they will conclude that their lives are without meaning.

Which of the following uses reasoning most similar to that used in the argument above?

(A) If people believe that their lives are meaningful, they must admit that life itself has a discernible purpose, and thus that life itself can be understood. If people believe that life can be understood, they will never give up trying to understand their lives. As a result, if people believe that their lives are meaningful, they will never give up trying to understand their lives.

(B) If human beings attempt to answer unanswerable questions, they will be faced with a decision between admitting that their understanding is limited or that the world is unknowable. If they decide the former, they must admit that their lives are meaningless; if the latter, that the world is meaningless.

(C) Because human beings attempt to understand their lives, they ask themselves unanswerable questions. Because they ask themselves unanswerable questions, they conclude that the world in unknowable and therefore meaningless. Thus human beings should not attempt to understand their lives.

(D) If human beings attempt to understand that which is incomprehensible, they will have to admit defeat. If they admit defeat, they will soon regard their lives as meaningless. If they regard their lives as meaningless, they will no longer attempt to understand that which is incomprehensible. Therefore it is impossible to attempt to understand that which is incomprehensible.

(E) Whenever people attempt to find meaning in their lives, they ask unanswerable questions. When they ask unanswerable questions, they must provide themselves with false answers. False answers, therefore are incompatible with the attempt to find meaning in life.

You have 30 seconds to pick your answer. Post it as a comment, and I'll let you know if you got it right. The first person to correctly answer the question will get a special "blog" smiley face!

Tune in later tonight to find out how I did on the practice LSAT (but don't get your hopes up).

Quotes

2007-10-23T17:04:00.000-06:00

Just a few things I've said that I want written down after I die:

"Happy Halloween: The only day that scaring the crap out of small children is socially acceptable."
"Take a picture of a teenager and you've created a memory. Give a teenager a camera and the internet will never be the same again."
"Everybody smile, it's the end of the world."
"Taco Bell is basically dog food"

More to come soon.

A Real Live Philosophy Major

2007-10-22T10:36:00.000-06:00

Avid readers of the "blog" have surely noticed by now that the word 'prospective' has disappeared from the 'about me' section of my "blog" profile. That, darling readers, is because I am no longer a prospective Philosophy major. As of about an hour ago, I am a real-life, bona fide, honest-to-goodness Philosophy major.

I signed a piece of paper, and the chair of the Philosophy department signed the piece of paper. Then he said "welcome to the department." Years from now, when I'm begging for spare change on the corner of 44th and Colfax, I will look back on this moment and say in a loud, slurred voice "Why didn't I stick with English?"

But seriously, guys, this is exciting news. It might even call for a new "blog" holiday. We'll call it Philosophy Day, and it will happen on the penultimate Monday of each month. Each Philosophy Day of the year will have it's own Philosophy major, whom we will all toast simultaneously at 10:15 AM (8:15 AM if you happen to live in Colorado) with vodka shots.

The October Philosophy Day will obviously be dedicated to me, so quick get out your novelty shot glasses, comrades, you're already late!

Just a Good Ol' Boy

2007-10-22T02:25:00.000-06:00

I took off my orange baseball cap, even though it said "Just a good ol' boy" on it, and looking at myself in the side-view mirror, with tendrils of yellow hair curling around my face like the tentacles of a manic but sexy octopus, I should have been Botticelli's model.
Then I put my hat back on.
It didn't belong to me, and that's just the way things were back then in Vermont. We contemplated Wild Raisins and interpreted Interrupted Ferns, and everything belonged to us, even if it didn't, because we were intellectuals, and stealing isn't wrong when you're a noncognitivist.

Ode to Vermont

2007-10-22T01:27:00.000-06:00

O Vermont, if I knew your state song,

I would sing it at the top of my lungs,
And if I also happened to have a moose,
I would sing your song to it, possibly in tongues.

Eighty-five percent of your economy is B&Bs,
And I would also present the moose with peonies,
But most of all I love the other fifteen percent
Which is roadside maple syrup stands,
often ones not made out of cement.

When I'm in you I don't have to wear clothes,
Because your citizens like to sunbathe topless and doze.
If you seceded from the union, not many people would mind,
But I don't care that you're a Birkenstock-wearing pinko commie state,
Because you like the Red Sox,
And I don't know anything about baseball,
But I still think you're OK, Vermont.

Dragons and Giants

2007-10-17T14:33:00.000-06:00

Today was my first day of teaching philosophy to my group of ten second graders at an elementary school in Springfield. I read them "Dragons and Giants," the Frog and Toad story about how one goes about being brave.

I asked them some questions like "Is there a certain way people look when they're being brave?" I got answers like "you look tall", "you look mad", and "You look like you aren't scared." Then I asked them "Do you think that you can still be brave, even if you're scared?" They all yelled out their opinions, but no one could come up with an example, so I asked them "What's something you've done that you think is brave?"

The boy sitting on my right had a large, jagged scar running down the middle of his forehead. He raised his hand and said "When this man I know hit me in the face with a bottle, I pulled the pieces of glass out of my own head and didn't cry." Most of the kids had similar stories that they wanted to tell, and our discussion of the philosophical issues didn't get much farther.

Much as I hate to admit it, there are some problems philosophy can't solve.

This is what "Blogs" are for:

2007-10-16T23:02:00.001-06:00

What if Schrödinger's cat and Pavlov's dog had a baby? We could call it Schrödlov's mouseketeer and give it its own reality show on C-SPAN2!

The Gig is up

2007-10-10T06:12:00.000-06:00

I think my coworkers are starting to become suspicious. They haven't said anything...yet, but their sideways glances in my direction are filled with a malicious curiosity. The first time it happened I think they just convinced themselves that they hadn't seen anything, or that there was some other reasonable explanation. Perhaps they thought that it was all in their heads. It wasn't, and gradually it became harder and harder to ignore.
The first few inquires were soft and polite. They'd ask if perhaps I'd hurt myself, or provide me with some other easy explanation to use as an escape. Which I did, every time. Eventually that tactic failed too as they began to realize that I invariably told them what they had told me without really explaining anything. Sure it might have been deceitful, dishonest even, but looking back did I really have a choice?
At last I think that my web of confusion has finally torn. They're watching me closer than ever, and little by little they're starting to realize that their first reaction was correct. Every time one of my gloves breaks or gets dirty as I'm preparing food I become the target of a half dozen curious eyes. Fortunately I've practiced and can now change out my large, non-sterile, food service grade latex gloves for new ones in under two seconds without showing more that a flash of skin. I see their frustration as I return to work with nothing revealed. Still my attempts to hide the truth are only making me more suspicious. Maybe it's time to stop wearing purple pizzazz nail polish to work.

Dispatches From the Buckland Basement: 1.7

2007-09-30T17:56:00.000-06:00

Chocolate crepes, white chocolate fondue crepes, pina colada mouse crepes with chocolate shavings and whipped cream. There's not much that would get me out of bed before noon on the weekend, but Sunday brunch at Buckland is well worth the suffering.

Dispatches From the Buckland Basement: 1.6

2007-09-28T13:48:00.000-06:00

Last weekend I met a guy on the bus. Creepy, I know, but he reads my favorite obscure literary quarterly and likes Douglas Hofstader and isn't a Republican, and he even has cats who throw up on the floor.

So yesterday I met him at Hampshire, and we went to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. It was a lovely, nostalgia-inspiring field trip. Then he gave me a tour of the Hampshire campus.

One thing led to another, and I ended up watching his screen saver (did you know those served an actual purpose at one point in time?), which was an entrancing game of ping pong, played by two rectangles which slid up and down the sides of the screen, bouncing a square back and forth between them. It also kept time: The rectangle on the left would miss the "ball" once every minute, and the rectangle on the right would miss every hour. The score of the game was recorded at the top of the screen and corresponded to the time.

The Hampshire boy and I had been watching the game intently for about five minutes, when all of a sudden, the rectangle on the right stopped moving. It just sat there at the bottom of the screen, refusing to play the game. The rectangle on the left scored point after point, changing the time from 4:48 to 5:48 to 6:48, and the rectangle on the right didn't move.

It took about 30 seconds for things to go back to normal. The rectangle on the right went back to blocking the "ball," and the clock reset itself to the proper time, erasing all evidence of the extra points which were scored by the rectangle on the left, but which really symbolized a victory for the rectangle on the Right.

The Hampshire boy said it must have been a glitch in the program, but readers of the "blog" will surely be no more persuaded by this bourgeois argument than I was. What I witnessed yesterday afternoon was free will. The spontaneous creation of consciousness.

This is clearly the most momentous metaphysical breakthrough of the past three centuries, so now that I've told my story, I will go back to writing my econ paper and wait for my letter from the Nobel Prize committee.

In the meantime, we can all learn a valuable lesson from the rectangle on the right. Whether you're a Mount Holyoke student who's so busy with school that she barely leaves her room except to scavenge for food or a Hampshire student who spends his days wandering aimlessly through a neohippie haze of pot smoke and quasi-Eastern religious experimentation, it's sometimes good to just stop. And put to use some of that free will which used to separate us from inanimate objects.

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

2007-09-27T00:03:00.001-06:00

Dispatches From the Buckland Basement: 1.5

2007-09-26T22:01:00.000-06:00

Dennis Kucinich is just as cute as a little bleeding-heart, gay-loving, tree-hugging, pinko button, and that's all I have to say about tonight's debate.

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

2007-09-25T01:54:00.001-06:00

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

2007-09-18T22:22:00.000-06:00

Dispatches From the Buckland Basement: 1.4

2007-09-18T08:39:00.000-06:00

I was sitting in Existentialism before class, sipping my coffee and trying to finish the reading that was assigned for today. Professor Wartenberg walked in, and I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was 8:39.
'We're starting class late,' I thought.
We discussed Sartre's Nausea and the difference between a thing' s appearance and its existence. We learned Sartre's explanation for why there is stuff as opposed to nothingness.
We pondered at length Sartre's notion of time consisting only of the present.
I looked back up at the clock.
It was still 8:39.
It all made sense for a second, and then Professor Wartenberg explained the Dostoevsky assignment for Wednesday. He looked up at the clock and said
"Does anyone have a watch? The clock's broken."
That ruined it.

Lawn Monster

2007-09-17T21:35:00.000-06:00

I'm limping around today on account of being attacked and mauled by a lawn sprinkler. I had been blissfully running around a friends yard when I rounded a tree, and the next thing I knew I was on the ground in a considerable amount of pain. Apparently I had collided with a large metal moving sprinkler like the one seen in the picture (spiked wheels and all). Witnesses to the incident reported that I hit it with what can only be described and a running drop kick and that despite its weight it had preformed a full 360 degree flip before landing unscathed and right side up about three feet away. While I don't exactly recall what I did moments before hitting the ground I have a feeling it was somewhat less graceful.
The aftermath was a gigantic bruise of my left foot and three consecutive spike shaped cuts of my right knee. If there had been a camera present this would already be on youtube. As if the sprinkler hadn't done enough damage the lawn chair I sat on to recover sprung forward and whacked the back of my head when I got up adding insult to injury. This marks my worst lawn related accident since that gnome thing which for the sake of my dignity (what's left of it) I will not mention here.

A Concise Retort

2007-09-16T04:30:00.000-06:00

When people tell me that the problems of my generation are no greater or more significant than those faced by my predecessors and should therefor be looked upon as an innate part of the human condition, I promptly tell them to fuck off, because if perspective breeds apathy then I'm content with the ignorant assumption than my actions have meaning and consequence.

Interpreting Art: 'The Penitent Magdalen' by Agostino Carracci

2007-09-14T18:55:00.000-06:00

"I'm an attractive woman, Ted. Why can't I seem to find a relationship that lasts?

Maybe my boyfriends would stick around longer if I didn't whip them, kill them, skin them, and hang their skulls from trees to demarcate the boundaries of my forest habitat.

I know I should hang your skull up with the others, but, sniff, I can't help remembering how sweet you were, Ted. You got me a pet cherub for Valentine's Day and everything.

It's like I don't even know what's right anymore, you know? I've been going around my whole life just assuming that killing men was the right thing to do. Just because it's what I've always done. But what if it's not right? What if Mom and Grandma and Great-Grandma were all wrong?

This totally sucks, Ted. I just want to be loved."

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

2007-09-13T21:27:00.001-06:00