I just installed my entire condo with compact fluorescent lightbulbs. And if you don't think that gets me excited, well, you just don't know Dirk Awesome.
Today I spoke with a federal agent. My good friend Yeti is working for a contractor for the DoD, so he has to get a rather substantial background check.
I am eating dinner whilst watching an episode of The West Wing whilst writing lesson plans for the coming semester whilst mentally planning my class for tomorrow whilst waiting for a phone call to discuss a draft of a chapter of a textbook I am going to submit tomorrow to a publisher.
I'm at home after a long day of work, watching the West Wing. As I have written before, it is great escaping to this alternate universe where people are basically good and try to make "the right" decisions. They sometimes fail, but they try.
Well, I found another bit of idealism in a video on youtube. This is the video to "The Saints are Coming" by Green Day and U2; the second half of the video gives me chills.
For those of you who were looking forward to my running commentary on the State of the Union address, please accept my apologies. Blogger was not letting me post.
You didn't miss much, though. My comments were pretty awful, and not very entertaining. Basically, I think that the State of Union is not a good subject for a running diary, since there aren't enough things happening (there weren't even as many reaction shots as I would have liked).
Even though it was a difficult subject, Skye did a good job with hers. Check it out here.
For all those who are interested: I will be keeping a running diary of tonight's State of the Union. This diary promises to a lot of self-righteous ranting with little or no entertainment value. I trust that you will all tune in.
By the way: why is it so difficult for me to figure out when the State of the Union is going to be? Every year, I check in early and mid January to see when the address is. Every year, I find zero information. Every year, I somehow stumble onto a some last minute indication that the speech is that night. There must be a better way...
NOTE: It is 9:08 pm, and blogger.com is having technical problems. I'm trying...seriously.
I am bummed that that Patriots lost. As I told Skye last night, the last time I was in a city with a professional sports team that competed for the national championship was 1991. I thought the Patriots could end that streak.
Skye hosted a football party for me, which was nice of her. I had a lot of fun, and there were good people there. I only regret that I didn't get to speak much to the roommate's brother and girlfriend.
There is a new vaccine on the market, Gardacil. This is a vaccine that could drastically reduce the spread of cervical cancer. Some right-wingers are against it because it might promote sexual activity ("I won't get cervical cancer, so I'll just sleep with anyone!"). I am not against the drug, but I am against the ad campaign. Their slogan is: "one less," as in "one less case of cerivical cancer." Those of you who are well-versed with my more annoying qualities can probably guess that I am taking issue with the grammar of the ad campaign; it should be "one fewer," rather than "one less." I guess that didn't test quite as well.
In other news, my semester is approximately three hours away from being done. We gave the final in both of my classes today, and we graded it. I also completely prepared the spreadsheet that calculates the grades. All we have to do now is to determine where the grade cutoffs will be.
I rewarded myself for a near end-of-semester with samosas and Studio 60, which was on again tonight. It was still good, and had a couple of really good moments. I don't remember what they are. I followed that up with an episode of the West Wing as an additional reward. It was one of the better episodes of season 4: "Game On," which is the one with presidential debate. Good stuff.
I'm on the lookout for more music like "An Honest Mistake" by the Bravery and "Break," by the Cinematics. Let me know if you have suggestions.
Skye sent me an article that I am trying to digest. This is one of the secondary issues on my backburner that I am interested in, but frankly I am way underqualified to say anything about it at this point.
Other online reading is by Jordan Ellenberg, who I want to claim as a colleague (he is at Wisconsin, although we missed each other by a year). He wrote an article on slate.com about grade inflation. Also, he apparently wrote a novel, which I would like to read.
A lot has happened in the past month, although I am not going to write about it now. You see, I was supposed to have put in a good half day of work on my textbook yesterday, and a full day today. The day is halfway done, and I haven't been able to start working (this weblog isn't helping, but I am only going to write for 5 minutes or so before I leave to write the text). I'll dole out stories from the past month over the next week or so...or maybe I'll just let it go.
To paraphrase Jon Stewart: John McCain has stayed true to his values...which are that he really wants to be president. For every good idea he has, he seems to cave on one good idea. There was a time when he impressed me, but now: not so much.
I just got out of a meeting about the possibility of me teaching a course on discrete math next year. That would be great, because it would cover ideas like group theory and probability. Since my dissertation was on probabilistic group theory, this is interesting to me.
Skye and I are working out way through Six Feet Under, which is good. I am personally working my way through The West Wing, which is fantastic. I am done with season three, and I will stop after season 4 (when Sorkin leaves the show). Then I will probably move on to season 3 of Arrested Development, and then The Wire.
I have also almost caught up on my podcasts from the past month. This means that I might get a subscription to To the Best of Our Knowledge, which is often ridiculously interesting.
I should also mention that Skye and I went to a Spanish-speaking dinner. This was just a dinner at a bar for a bunch of people who want to speak Spanish. Since I haven't spoken Spanish seriously in 9 years (nor un-seriously in 3), I wasn't able to contribute a lot to the conversation. I was happy, though, that I could understand most everything that was said. I was never good at that when I was studying it in high school.
