Uncooperative Crickets

Sunday Morning

Skye's sister and brother-in-law are coming tonight, and I am excited to meet them. They are going to bring their unborn child, since the sister doesn't really have much choice. This might be the first week that I ever see two pregnant friends in the same week (the Veecees are the other pregnant ones).

I've been listening to a good amount of No Doubt recently, and I have found that I think "Sunday Morning" is a really good song. Please allow me to enumerate why:

1. It has a nice riff at the beginning of the song. It goes away, and then comes back periodically. All good things.
   
2. It has many different "melodies." It has the verses ("sappy, pathetic little me"), the chorus ("you came in with the breeze"), the second part of the chorus ("I thought I knew you"), the end ("And you want me badly") and the middle eight ("I know who I am, but who are you?").
   
3. It goes from choppy ("you came in with the breeze") to smooth ("I thought I knew you").
   

I know what you are thinking: being a mathematician ain't nothing but Beamers, bourbon, and babes. While all of this is true, there is at least one serious drawback: you can't stop thinking about things outside of math terms. If you give me two numbers, I will immediately start to compare them, perform some sort of operation on them, or determine if the numbers are significant (prime? perfect?). You wouldn't think that this would be a problem in everyday life (aside from that fact that it can be rather boring to talk to me at dinner parties), but it has caused me problems in the past. I just wish that I could turn it off sometimes. I think this has something to do with my love of basketball and baseball statistics as a kid, too. Curses.

Skye and I saw The Break-Up last night. It was okay, not bad. It wasn't as much of a comedy as I had expected. It is probably completely forgettable - I'll let you know in a week. Or maybe I won't let you know in a week; it depends on how forgettable the movie actually was.

There were a lot of familiar faces in the movie. I couldn't place it at the time, but I knewIvan Sergei from Once a Thief. This is weird because, you know, Once a Thief. It's also great to see Justin Long doing well. In addition to his small role in this movie, he has the Mac commericials with John Hodgman and a new movie coming out about an alternative college. It seems interesting from an educational point of view, although I doubt that the film will explore the possibility of unstructured learning much.

Also, I am learning that there probably will not be much room for semi-unstructured learning at my current job. I just had a meeting with my boss, and she didn't seem to think what I was doing would fly.

I took care of business today: I made four phone calls, ranging from mortgage companies to dentists. I also played two hours of basketball. It was fun, but an out-of-control elbow to the jaw put me in a bad mood.

Also infuriating: Bill O'Reilly (thanks to Tsjaz for this one). I gave O'Reilly the benefit of the doubt for a long time. I can appreciate that people have different political opinions than my own, and I truly believe that this is a good thing. Hence, I didn't fault O'Reilly. But when you tell a mistake (lie?) about WWII U.S. soldiers slaughtering Germans at Malmady, Belgium (it was the other way around) to justify Abu Ghraib, it begins to get a little bad. Just a little - we can all make mistakes. When you tell the same mistake/lie again a second time a year later to justify Haditha, then you are irresponsible. When your own viewer calls you out on it, and you shrug it off, then you are despicable. When you change the transcripts of the show to no longer include the mistake/lie (thereby acknowledging that you were wrong) but do NOT apologize to the memories of the slaughtered U.S. troops, then you are evil. Keith Olbermann was way too easy on you, Bill O'Reilly.

I talked to Trapper last night - always fun.

Oh, and I still enjoy going to the movies with Skye.

"They know what they did."

posted by Dirk Awesome @ 4:00 PM