Last chance!

Here's the casual blog reader's first glimpse into my dorm room. This is the part behind and above the computer, as you can see.

Oh, yeah, the main point of the post. Anyone in the Ten County Downstate Region who wants those CD towers, or borrowage of the books, all mentioned below, you've got like 30 hours before they get shipper off to sit in a room upstate.

Yeah.

Online in the dorm room. Huzzah!

Monday, just another manic

I "moved" into a single room in a dorm on campus, Greeley, in the sense that I have the keys now and I have been in there. Although I still have this apartment, which is about fifteen times bigger and has a private bathroom, for the next eight days. I don't know, yet, what I'm going to move into there and when The good news is that the room is like ninety degrees right now, plus I know a couple people who live in the building.

I've been careful not to schedule any classes before two in the afternoon the past few semesters. I found that it was a great boost to my happiness and success. I've got a 10:40 on Mondays and Wednesdays, now. Brutal. But I guess once I get settled in I'm going to be able to skip out on the time I would otherwise have spent commuting to campus and parking.

Ralph Nader's mom died. I don't suspect it'll slow him down, much. I just learned the other day that he had a hand in that whole deal with South Africa using generic AIDS drugs instead of paying grotesque rates for patented name brand US stuff. He's a busy guy.

I took a picture of a friend today but he didn't want it posted, and he pointed out that I got him up there in a group shot last week, anyway, so I'm going to honor his request. You, dear reader, will have to make due with straight text.

What's black and white and green all over?

What does the Stony Brook Press do when the motherload of incoming freshman and transfer students (or as motherly a load as one finds in the Spring semester) are milling around the Student Activities Center (pronounced "sack")? We go to the cabinets and get out the heavy artillery, Executive Editor Rob (and Managing Editor Jowy, not pictured here) to get some attention and distro some news-papers!

You have to get these people while their minds are open and stuff some news-papers in there.

In other news, my man at the Green Party State Committee Meeting reports that that dude from that movie is looking to be our candidate for Governor. I'm cautiously optimistic. Apparently his appeals (to the wonkish State Committee Meeting attendees, no less) were short on specific policy proposals, which is a red flag, especially when you're dealing with "celebrity" candidates. You never know if this guy is just trying to promote his bookstore/coffee house. But there may be additional candidates, so we'll see.

In New York State, the Governor's race has special signifigance for political parties. Get 50,000 votes (that number will be good until they decide it's not enough of a barrier to stifle competition) and you are formally recognized as a party for four years--without this you are at a tremendous disadvantage in that you can't put any candidates on the ballot without going through an onerous petitioning process that saps your resources like a sap on a resource tree. Also, parties are listed on every ballot in the order of their vote totals from the last gubernatorial election.

What all this means is, even if I did like putative Democratic nominee Elliot Spitzer (and I guess I'm up in the air about that), I'd be looking to move some votes for a Green for institutional purposes--even if there was a close race with a "spoiler" situation (I just vomited in my mouth), which there won't be in 2006. Which is why I want a decent candidate. Maybe Hicks is that candidate, maybe not.

I'll settle for any crazy to run against Hillary Clinton. She's a menace.

I don't care if it rains or freezes...

...as long as I got creepy lifesize wooden Jesus (photoshopped with pasted, oversized, my unevenly dilated eyes from the previous post) sitting on the dashboard of my car.

I work the angles sharp and precise

While I was in Earlbany I had an eye exam. For six hours afterwards, this is what my pupils looked like.

AFray = The Greek

Andrew Fraley came back from Colorado with long hair and stubble. If only he squinted, he would be virtually indistinquishable from former Clinton administration figure and current television-yammering-idiot George Steophanopoulos.

On a dark and dusty highway / East of Omaha

I just got back from a three day trip up to Albany. Good times. No good pictures. My reading list to follow:

1) The Shroud of the Thwacker: a novel by Chris Elliot. Jackpot. Bumped Brinkley.

2) Brinkley's Beat: People, Places and Events that Shaped My Time by David Brinkley. Definately worth the $1 I spent on it; Brinkley, you old sentamentalist! Wry, indeed.

3) The Aventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. I gave this recent Pulitzer Prize winner to my Dad for Chrimmastime and he has generously lent it to me.

4) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi. Great for falling asleep to.

5) The Gentle Art of Making Enemies by James Abbot McNeill Whistler. Letters by, and papers about, the bellicose artist.

6) Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity by David Allen. I stopped reading this book one third of the way through. Ha ha.

7) Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Class reading I never finished. Stephanie says it's good. Labeled "unabridged" to take some of the sting out of the intimidating 124-page length.

8) Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter. I've been meaning to reread this for what must be at least fifteen years. I'm pretty sure I didn't understand most of it as a child.

I'm trying to draw LBJ

Eh?

WTF?

I guess. If you're really hungry. It does take forty minutes to prepare in a conventional oven.

The secret of NiMH

It's so weird in here. And not just because I cleaned the other half of the main room, so it's tidy for the first time in about a year and ½. I moved the lamp from the corner to a position close to the center of the room. It's significantly brighter and the shadows are all not where I expect them to be. It's very disorienting.

And, it turns out that the cheapest vacuum cleaner you can find in the low cost big retail box isn't neccessarily the best vacuum cleaner. Today was only the third time I've ever used the vacuum cleaner, so it's only just sinking in now.

Oh, snap! Check out that crazy glare on the Ted Williams picture. It's an ordinary, dark black and white photo that looks like a sun-faded sepia. I think it's the ghost of Teddy. It means the Sox are going to win the World Series with Alex Cora at shortstop.

The Reverend Doctor

The Boondocks on Cartoon Network is a good show, significantly better than the daily comic on which it is based. Last night's episode, The Return of the King was the best I've seen and, no hyperbole, exceptional television. It's got me reflecting on the holiday I would have otherwise ignored, and King's unfinished business.

The show's web page says they are rerunning the episode twice next weekend. Check it oot.

While we're at it

Does anybody want these guys? Two lovely little CD towers? They were a gift when I moved into this apartment, but I've never actually used them. They don't gibe with my current CD storage methods (big book for audio, shoebox for data).

The federal Books Progress Administration

So does anybody (who I see in person) want to borrow either Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs, Now I Can Die In Peace: How ESPN's Sports Guy Found Salvation, With a Little Help From Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank and the 2004 Red Sox, Confessions of a Tax Collector or Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans? Because they're just sitting around my apartment like shiftless hippies.

I'm forever yours

Faithfully!

Later that very night...

Here we see Sean's going away to Japan party. Sean not pictured. Isn't it ironic?

They didn't like the indoorbq idea

Inclement weather (and I do mean inclement--we got some hail for real) put the stop to any talk of BBQ, but we got some Chinese food (easy on the snow peas, hot shots) and the conventional festivities sufficed (pictured above).

Laundry day

Jim Rice isn't the only "quite a handsome man". (See update to the previous post.) Check out my sartorial supremacy on and around the foot region. This is how I roll when my sneakers are in the warsh. How far am I going with that warsh? All the way to plastic sandal, bootie sock, track pants junction.

This just in, sources indicate that pedal is an adjective meaning related to the foot, so that sartorial supremacy phrase could have been further ossified and gussified. I leave that operation as an exercise to the reader.

I got up late in the morning, cleaned another half of another room. In the process, I did a little planning/organizing of my various extant projects, as many of these manifest themselves as stuff that I have tossed somewhere in a haphazard fashion. Then the warsh, discussed above, where a friendly stranger asked where the women were at, whose laundering on our behalf would allow us to enjoy playoff football.

No football for me. It's off to some sort of barbeque-ish like happening at Fort Standard and then a birthday / going-away-to-Japan party for Kempleton Sean.

I almost forgot to mention

The Baseball Hall of Fame writervoterjerks are a bunch of jerks. It is a nutrage that they have once again passed over Jim Rice, the premier slugger of his era, for inclusion. I guess he should have et more steroids.

Oh...so sleepy...2:22...222222 is l33tsp34k for zzzzzzzzzzzz

Update: weighing in, as he is wont to do, with his dissenting opinion, Coxswain Jeff (after complaining about the muted commenting options on my blog) wants it known "that the premier slugger of Rice's era was not Jim Rice, but Reggie Jackson."

Whatever.

More of what happened early last week

I came up with this elaborate sequence of brainstorms for ways to recruit for and promote the Stony Brook Press, and everybody else seems to be too busy intercessing to care, at this point. So when I noticed the day before it happened that orientation was beginning for incoming Spring freshman and transfer students, I decided to spring into action. I managed to corral a couple of fellow editors (despite a mysterious foot/throat ailment), pictured above, and get to the grim but hardy task of passing out the last issue of the Press. There were a lot of them. Issues of the Press. Still sitting on the loading dock to which they were delivered by the printer. Six weeks ago. Last semester. Not the best sign.

But, in fairness, they were pretty heavy.

The key to getting oriented students to taking the paper is in your approach. The last thing you want to do is say, "Do you want a copy of the Stony Brook Press?" This seems polite, to polite people, but it allows ample space for a conception of the world in which your new friends do not, in fact, want a copy. (Also, it is bad to use the word newspaper. College students find this off-putting because they are dumb and do not read). More than ½ of them will weigh their options and decide that, no, they do not want a copy. What you want to do is you want to give them the old, "Don't forget your copy of the Stony Brook Press." Then they thank you like you just did them a big favor. Which is appropriate, because you did.

It's also good to set up a shady little corner just outside the perimeter of the official orientation activities and get them on their way out. Then, tired and confused, it is easy for them to confuse your "don't forget this" line with some sort of official distribution of critical new student materials. Which is appropriate, because it might as well be.

US Rollergirls are bruising my heart

My Chrimmastime toy vs. Rob's. I didn't know the US Geological Surveyors were issued sidearms. This is what greeted me every time I turned away from the screen during the new episode of Lost.

Not really; Rob frequently yielded the armaments to me to express my hostility towards advertising. Lost was prefaced with an hour long, grossly narrated clipshow piece of crap. Television is dumb. If they really can't produce more than seven episodes or however insanely thin they are currently spreading their paté, they should just divide the year into three seasons and run a different show instead of reruns. And then Lost comes back in the fall, with no weeks off, ever. As for the new episode itself, it was really awesome. Especially because I have been graced with the ultimate satirical tools to dismiss the solemnity of that "The Lord is my Shepherd" routine (thank you, Knockout).

There have been complaints (?) from my readers (!) about the dropoff in postings. So you get this random assortment of old news (Lost) and decontextualized tangents (Roller Derby).

VMFX, who has succeeded me as the Press's official in-house abuser of onerous initials, turned me on to the roller derby revival. Check it yourself at http://www.usrollergirls.com/.

Oh, yeah, I didn't post anything since my birthday. The day itself was mediocre. It was like any other Tuesday. But, no worries, I intend to celebrate at least three or four more times with peoples who couldn't be around for the actual event. So maybe five average birthdays equals one great one.

Stephanie told me that I have the same birthday as Pat Benatar (well, this after telling me that my birthday was in the same week as Dave Grohl, one of her personal faves). Pat Benatar? Booooooring. I checked myself on the internet, to see if there was anyone cooler with whom I shared that, my very special day. I immediately accused her of passing up great opportunities to link me with George Foreman and Rod Stewart...and then I hit paydirt.

Rasputin.

Green lights at the magic hour

24 hours and 5 minutes

My birthday isn't actually until tomorrow, but I couldn't wait to rip the Shatman's head off.

I had one of those humorous conclusion to a phone conversation, moments ago. My friend said goodbye, and then I said goodbye, and then she said bye again, quieter. This usually happens when you say something that may or may not substitute for goodbye, but in this case it was the pure stuff, uncut. A moment of levity in an otherwise unlevened day.

I was on campus a bit trying to arrange some academic affairs, and I tried to take a couple interesting photos, maybe some along the lines of the series I took when I was in that digital print class. Most of them didn't come out well, but a couple are fairly sweet. There's also two I got that would be excellent backgrounds that have large sky parts where you could put a lot of text and then interesting objects along the edges. Never know when those might come in handy.

I don't own a corkscrew

I knew this wouldn't end well.

That part in the middle got me worked up

Spent all afternoon doing positive chorish things like cleaning up the giant sprawling mass of laundry that occupied my bedroom, and planning recruiting efforts for the Press.

Went a little stir crazy at one point between bouts of productivity. It's too cold in the world. There need to be more places like the mall where you can go and walk around a lot in them but they are heated. Cuz I can't just go to the mall every day and walk around in it aimlessly. That's sick.

I paced in the apartment and tossed a softball into the glove my Dad got me for Chrimmastime. Only amuses for so long.

Last night I stumbled upon a PR piece from UCLA aboot a polisci prof who was publishing a study demonstrating (it was "found") the evidence of bias (they feel comfortable assuming their audience knows in advance it is liberal bias) in the media. The PR piece is written in a way to totally appeal to lazy journos who will then parrot their BS bottom-lining. They made a big effort to appear impartial and fair, not taking any funding from anybody and recruiting students halfsies Dem / Rep (I got news for you clowns, independants and nonvoters easily outnumber them), but they had all kinds of glaring methodological problems right under the surface. The most outrageous example is the researcher's assumption that the average member of congress (adjusting for the Senate's overrepresentation of low population states) represents the political view of the average American, which is taken as the baseline dividing liberal and conservative. That's wicked retahded for so many reasons I'm not going to get into them all. The biggest problem with that assumption is that if there is a media bias, which is what they're trying to prove to begin with, wouldn't that skew who ends up elected to define the average politician? And, then, again, with most people not voting, the elected are a godawful measure of the politics of the citizenry. Anyway, I got really pissed about it, and I'm getting mad again just thinking about it now. I might write a Press article on it later. But I want to read the actual study first, not just the university puff piece.

Also, I own one single solitary sock with a nike swoosh on the neck. How does that happen?

Man, at least this table is super clean

Spent the day as follows:

Phone calls/e-mails to arrange my troubled academic affairs. There was a moment of comedy when, shortly after I left voicemail for Stony Brook administrator Dr. Peter Baigent, he called me back promptly and I couldn't manage to depress the appropriate keys to answer my phone.

Cleaning the apartment. It's a job with multiple stages. Maaan, that table, under that table, the walls near that table...that whole area code is tops in neatness. Also did some dishes.

Considering problems facing the Stony Brook Press. I mailed a rambling brainstorming missive to the editorial board about recruiting and retaining new members for the upcoming semester. Planning some things I'd like to write aboot, principle among them a series of feature pieces on planned student life/activities to be published before they occur so readers can act on them by attending events thus described. That ought to give some newly recruited members something to do.

Watching Game Four of the Sox-Yanks ALCS on DVD. My DVD player was all wierd at first, it was super skippy at the top of the show. I think the disk is fine, so I dunno what to think. It settled down like D. Lo. Kevin Millar doesn't get his props for turning Mariano and the Yankees back into pumpkins at midnight on October 17, 2004 with that leadoff walk that started The Greatest Comeback Ever. Best part of this game I forgot about: when ARod struck first for the Yankees with the two-run homer, and the Sox fan outside the ballpark threw the ball back in. Then Johnny Damon gets the ball off the centerfield grass and throws it out of the stadium and back to the street. Then somebody throws it back into the stadium, and an umpire has to pocket it. That was a magic moment, with the Sox having just fallen behind in the ultimate do-or-die game, of fun-lovin' high spirits for both the players and the fans. Watching it again I feel genuinely sad about the Damon free agency loss for the first time. It's the seventh inning now, Keith Foulke just went in. I don't know if I want to finish this game unpaused or go get some dinner / make some phone calls.

Fort Standard

Not a moment of respite for enjoying a phone conversation at that nervous hospital. Not shown are my feet and legs, currently under brutal pillows-akimbo assault.

Hungry

For a "college town", Stony Brook is dramatically underserved on, among other things, the pizza front. The quantity and quality of orderable pizzas is grotendous, and the wait is muito boo! Im stahving and I'm halfway through the onerous 45 minute delivery time for wherever Mike Bling likes to get his pizzas. It must be the residual hostility of the community that never wanted the school here in the first place.

Funny story, literally moments after I published that post the pizza showed up early.

I got some The South on my windshield

This is what it looks like right before you get to the Midtown Tunnel.

Nine days and fifteen hundred miles later, I am back on Strong Island, in the basement apartment that will continue to be my home for another three and ½ weeks.

Final thoughts: there are about a gajillion times more tolls due when driving from Albany to Baltimore than from Baltimore to Wilmington, NC.

Ok, one more thought. I'm not from The South. And I've never read Y'all Magazine: The Magazine for Southern People. So I'm not really speaking from a position of experience. But it sounds, on the face of it, pretty condescending and stupid.

More old news

Hooray for sunsets, boo SUV-filled pahking lots. Also captured in the previous Raleigh stop.

Old news

I took this photo the last time I came through Raleigh and never got around to posting it. On the right is the theater where we saw the Johnny Knoxville picture show and on the left is the chocolate store where I bought the chocolates for the grab bag gift exhange.

Look at how ornery I have become

Damn you, North Carolina, give me back my phone!

That's me trying to express, via (perhaps silly) staged "upset" face, my genuine outrage over the nonfunctional cellphone.

Also bothering me at present...the Cotton Bowl was decided in the last five seconds. That would have been great fun if we didn't know the final score going in.

Homeward bound

Reversing my previous journey. Got virtually no sleep last night and then I headed oot for Raleigh. Ken had "TiVo"d the Cotton Bowl. Sadly, in the course of this hazardous life, we were unable to avoid seeing the after-the-fact score. So we're watching it now, but I already know I have to buy the man a six pack. The good news is he's got a New Year's Resolution to cut back on his alcohol intake so maybe I can pull some kind of scam on him. Also good news: he can't read, so he'll never know aboot this.

Rainy today. I dunno if that's why, but my cellphone reception, already roamier than Rome, has gone in the crapper. Which is bad news. Fortunately, I managed to find my way without any confused celly calls. But I miss the connectedness.

Went to a pretty cool Fiesta Bowl watchin' shindig with some of Ken's friends, several of whom attended the victorious Ohio State. College Football not really my favorite, but I can appreciate a couple games a year. High Definition TV is definately superior for sports.

Oh, yeah, I finished both Franken and Simmons, so now all I have to read on the way back is a sixty year old dissident economics book. That ought to get me to sleep before the sun rises.

Today we celebrate Guido Sarducci's birthday...

...but yesterday was New Year's Eve. An enthusiastic Mike (party host) hams up his armwaving hysterics for the camera. They were playing some hollerin'-happy card game for enthusiasts, while a few of us more reserved types played Texas Hold'Em at the less photogenic table adjacent.