Say WA!?!

From the Things I Can't Make Up File

The state of Washington was trying on a new motto a while ago. After spending over $200,000 doing, uh, research, a committee of clearly over-caffeinated, sun-deprived folks settled on Metronatural to replace Say WA! which had promptly fell flat on its face right out of the gate. I preferred a distant runner-up Come see the orcas while you still can!

The motto fiasco bubbled to the surface of my consciousness the other day thanks to a student's scribbling at the bottom of his paper. After diligently working numerous steps and showing all work, he proudly wrote "... and Wa-La! We have the answer!"

Wa-La?!? Talk about disassociation. I refuse to admit to how long it took me to figure out that he was referring to the term voila, which you may recall is French for the ancient Greek word eureka.

As painful as that un-word is to say, it is not at the top of my personal list for language debacles. My all time fave comes from a high school student who proudly wrote Sike! on the board, complete with circles and stars for a stronger rubbing-it-in effect. No amount of discussion could convince him that the word derived from psyche, itself an offspring of the ancient Greek word whacko.

And again I ask you, Say WA?

Two days later, I find this

Just thought I would post a blog before I go back to skipping across my shiny hardwood floors and suddenly springy carpets. And looky what I found in my rss feeder:


This is not the vacuum I bought but now I'm thinking I need one for other flat surfaces in the house. Please note the length of the cord. Even in miniature, there's enough there to cross the street. Is that kitty litter being sucked up?

One Day It Happens

For my birthday a few weeks back, I received a card that said:
One day it happens: You think to yourself, "You know, that music is kind of loud," and you reach over and turn it down. And you are 40.

I will not beat the dead horse discussion regarding how the number the volume dial is set to is inversely related to one's age until hearing aids are needed. Today I will add to the list of age determining tools. The measuring stick I speak of is the importance of household appliances and the effect of their performance on your well-being. More specifically, I am speaking of vacuums.

There are many levels at which appliances can be used to measure your age. The first is the fact that household appliance are even on your radar as a topic of contemplation. The second is that you went out and purchased a new vacuum rather than just using the one that was left behind by the previous renters or by the roommate who never used it even though it was his/hers. The third is that you did research into which vacuum is best on hairballs, both human and feline, pet hair, human hair, and hair of unknown origin. The fourth is that, even though it is Saturday and there is not a category 5 hurricane or a blizzard or a herd of wilderbeast outside your window, you chose to vacuum your entire house because you were so excited to have a new vacuum and you could not wait to see how it performed. For gaia's sake, you even got an extra hour of party time tonight because daylight saving time is over and you spent it vacuuming!

My personal experience, very recently, is that I was ready to throw out all the rugs, both throw and wall-to-wall, into the trash because they were filthy and only getting worse even though my Roomba was trying its hardest to keep up between my miserable bouts with the other so-called vacuum. You know it's bad when walking across the rug sends up little clouds of dust much like softball players do when when trotting across the infield. It was bad. So out came the Consumer Reports and off to Costmo we went. Upon arriving home, we couldn't wait to get the super sucker out of the confines of the packaging and plugged in. (Side note: the cord on this thing is so long, we can vacuum the neighbors' houses without changing sockets. Is this a symptom of McMansionitis?)

Much joy!! Our rugs are blue! Not gray—blue! The one in the hallway is green! Not gray—green! The one in the breakfast nook is tan! Not tan—tan! OK, that last rug didn't change color so much as it did texture. Just as joyous.

So, one day it happens. You think to yourself, "You know, I really need a new vacuum," and you go out and buy one and use it and love it. And you are 40.

Catching my breath

Oh, I hardly know where to begin. Mainly it's because I haven't blogged in so long that I have no idea where I left off.

Item: The latest instrument of torture to evolve in the realm known as The Meeting almost wiped out the math department here at humble little community college on the hill. I am speaking, of course, of the webinar. It used to be the case that the dungeon master had to be in the same room as the jailbirds. Now the disher of the punishment can be thousands of miles away and oblivious to the fact that his or her droning voice is causing your brain to leak out of your ears. I am not kidding when I tell you that fifteen minutes into the long-distance powerpoint presentation, I was asleep. Proximity is not a variable in the function that calculates the pervasive potential of powerpoint to pulverize perspicacious perceptions. When I came to, I heard the woman answer her cell phone—for the second time—and not miss a beat as she inserted the phrase "I'll have to call you back" into the description of how the counter on the screen will increase as more students sign in. And as we know five is greater than three so we know two more students have signed in.

Dante could not have imagined this horror. We thought Grizelda (not her real name) could hear our comments via speaker phone. The first clue that this was not the case was when I and a colleague were on our feet, bent over the table and screaming into the phone, "Grizelda! Can you hear us?!?" Her shpeel, which was appropriate only for elementary school-aged children, continued unabated. It was so odd because she did pause moments earlier and was responding to a question she must have heard. Well, given evidence that she couldn't hear us, L started packing up his bag while R and I started to laugh about Grizelda's obliviousness and mind-numbing voice. She was still droning on and on and on and on when suddenly L knocked the receiver off the hook and—we hope—disconnected Grizelda. When I could stop laughing long enough to open my eyes, I couldn't see R until I looked under the table. He had fallen out of his chair and was on all fours, pounding the floor and laughing so hard he couldn't breathe.

It's a good thing the windows to the conference room are frosted. Let's just keep this little incident between us, shall we?

(No) Parking Zone

Once again I find myself wandering The 'Pot like a CO2 molecule in a
bottle of pop that's been shook up. I believe there must be a branch
of science dedicated to determining what objects are most closely
related--like all used to complete a particular task--and the furthest
distance apart they can be placed.

Sent from my iPhone

Access Forbidden

Another story I can't make up.

I acquired new software. Cool. It's a calculator emulator for the computer. It works just like the actual handheld but the keystrokes stay visible on the screen. I figure this could eliminate about 250 questions per quarter. Questions along the line of "How did you type that in?" or "What are your window settings?" Anyway, our adventure begins when I try to install it on the computer in the classroom. I tried to log in as an administrator. No luck. The domain is not available. I don't know a lot but I know that is a problem like when an individual Borg is cut away from the collective. No individual thought is possible since all the applications are sitting on a server somewhere ... somewhere over there, wherever there is. Considering the PC I am trying to log into is a 10 year old PC, the analogy is not far off. This beige box is one glitch away from being a doorstop.

I place a call for help. It goes something like this:

Me: D, I can't log in as an administrator. Can you fix that?
D: Sure. I'm on it.

time passes

D: I logged in as you.
Me: How did you log in as me when I couldn't log in as me? Never mind. Before you answer, when I logged in successfully as a student, I couldn't reach the internet.
D: You ... couldn't ... reach ... the ... internet ... [D isn't thick or slow; he was just thinking out loud.]
Me: The last time this happened, J said he had to 'hit the switch in the closet.' Something I couldn't do.
D: Oh, is this in G10?

From the sound of his voice, I know D has clearly figured out what the problem is from my little comment. Are you ready for this?

D: When the janitor for that building pushes his bucket too far into the closet, it disconnects the internet connection.

I was severed from the most massive human creation in history by a bucket. Let the jokes begin.

Do you think stuff like this ever happens at NASA or in the Pentagon?

And this was a good day

Life with The T is nothing but joy. I never know what is going to happen next that is going to make me laugh out loud. I offer as evidence, one morning last week.

The T gets up, gets showered, gets fed and gets out the door. This is a day when she has to get to the bus stop for a 1+ hour ride thataway. I close the back door behind her and jump in the shower. The shower is centrally located between the front and back doors of the house. This makes a shower acoustically exciting. On occasion, you hear sounds but cannot discern from which direction they came. I think that has something to do with having your head under water and the sound waves breaking oddly. Whatever. My head was lathered up when I heard quite the ruckus at what I thought was the back door. I discerned it was the back door because the watchcats all ran in the opposite direction from the noise. Considering it was as loud as it was, I knew I was not reliving Psycho nor was I in danger from a burglar, watchcats' behavior notwithstanding.

The ruckus stopped so I figured The T finally got herself in the back door, grabbed whatever it was she forgot and got back out. But then I heard another ruckus. I believe it came from the front door this time because the pitter-patter gallop of retreating feet was moving in the opposite direction as they were before. I then heard steps through the house and then a door slamming and then nothing.

I rinsed, repeated, toweled off and had no idea what I just experienced—or failed to experience due to my being safely ensconced in the bathroom.

I get to my office when my chest rang—er, the cell phone in my chest pocket rang. It's The T telling me she drove for an hour to her job rather than take the bus. "Why?" I asked innocently. Well, it all began with a bag of used cat food, aka: poop. Ruckus #1 was The T unable to re-enter the house through the back door because the bag of poop which was hanging from the 1920s deadbolt for which we do not have a key, spun the deadbolt and locked her out. We've been hanging the day's deposit on that knob for two years now and this is the first instance of the bolt turning. Anyway, Ruckus #2 was The T coming in through the front door, grabbing what she forgot and then leaving. Hmm, as I'm writing this, I have no idea if she left through the front or the back door. I'll have to ask.

The reason she drove to her job, rather than jumping on the metro, was not because she missed the bus. No, she still had plenty of time this morning to get to the stop on time. She did not miss the bus. She missed the bus stop. She was wool gathering—just what you want to know about other drivers—and when she came to, she was too far past the stop so she just kept driving. For another 60+ miles.

I can hardly wait to see what is going to happen this week.

From numbers to words

Whereas the last post was all about numbers, this one is all about words—specifically, artistic ways of dealing with too many words on a page.

I brought home A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, by Tom Phillips this weekend. I picked it off the shelf of graphic novels because it was a new title amongst the other ones that don't seem to turn over too quickly. I then walked out of the store with it because it is very, very cool. If you ever get a chance to flip through the book, I suggest you do so. Words are artistically eliminated from the page and those that are left visible tell their own story. The art added to the page also lends itself to the message conveyed by the now highlighted text. The title itself is an example of the technique. W. H. Mallock titled his book A Human Document. Creative obscurity turned it into A Humument. All in all, not bad for a 19th-century novel plucked off a used book shelf for three pence.

This reminds me of Stephen Wright's line about not using a highlighter on important passages in texts. He instead uses a black Sharpie marker to block out the unimportant verbiage. Bravo!

Anyhow, I immediately strolled over to the 50-cent or trash cart in front of the store and brought home my own sacrificial text. While my artistic skills are not worth talking about, I thought perhaps I could find words on the page to describe my mood that day or an event or even use it like a hard-copy blog. It's not easy reading a page and remaining detached from the words enough to not get caught up in the author's original intent while cataloging the words enough to see which ones to save.

I'll let you know how my dismemberment of this tome progresses.

Is there a collective noun for "numbers"?

I'm pondering if there is a collective noun for numbers, other than the word numbers, course. That would be silly. Digits show up in all different kinds of places and are used in different ways. Is there a term to describe them when they show up on one blog entry?

0: number of times I'd eaten eggs benedict in the last 40 years

1: number of weeks in the fall quarter completed to date
also: number of times a student has asked me this quarter: Exactly what are you drinking?

2: difference between number of students who showed up on day one and the number of chairs in the room that faced the front

3: number of times I've eaten eggs benedict for breakfast in the last two weeks

4: number of minutes it takes me to cross campus from my brand spankin' new office to the room my 8 o'clock class is held in; does not include coffee pick-up

48: number of hours it took to render a digital copy of 5+ hours of Pride & Prejudice, starring His Dimpleness Colin Firth, and move it to my iPhone. Time well spent. Mr. Wickham looks smarmy no matter the screen dimensions.

4663: the simple, elegant and completely wrong answer



And just because it's cool: Zipskinny. Enter your zip code and get some cool census data, like the education level attainment, demographics, income levels and how it compares to neighboring zip codes. Not a bad use for numbers. Whereas "dictionary diving" is a term that refers to the act of getting lost in a dictionary even though you only went in with the intention of finding one word, "digit diving" refers to getting lost in a page a numbers like those on Zipskinny. I'm going to go type in the zips of all the places I've ever lived. Ta for now.

Brand new year! Let's rock!!

New books, sharpened, pencils, spiffy calculator, a backpack with 23 compartments that open and close. New clothes, a parking hang-tag, new shoes.












Excitement, anticipation, enthusiasm, eagerness, impatience, ambition, gusto, zest, piquancy.







When is the first break?








Agnes, by Tom Cochran
All images copyright 2007 Creators Syndicate Inc.