| The FBI file on Studs Terkel has been released as a pdf, in greatly redacted form, and a friend of mine pointed out that there is a baffling redaction on the straightforward information page.
Page 34 lists his name, sex, race, date and place of birth, residence, height, weight, hair and eye color, [REDACTED], complexion (dark), Social Security number, and Army serial number.
What is on that missing line??? What could come between eye color and complexion that's not already on the list? My friend's theory is "penis size". Any other ideas? | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment   |
| It's been a quiet few days on my LJ, and not just my end. The bulk of the last few days' friends page posts are RSS feeds of comics. I'll start!
Thursday was my next-older brother's birthday, and I happened to be planning a trip for which he was almost on the way to start around that time anyway, so in collusion with his wife I came up to visit overnight. I got there in the afternoon, talked to my SiL for a while before waking the younger child up from her nap to walk to school to collect the older child. We played for a while and then J got home and was duly surprised and happy. :-) Then dinner prep and dinner and cards and presents and dessert (carrot cake). The younger child said "Happy birthday, Daddy" roughly every 20 minutes, which was adorable. Friday morning I spent a little while reading to the younger child and letting her do my hair (a pretend hair dryer that gently blows cool air? kind of tickles), and seeing what the older child was doing with some art supplies.
Then I drove out to Madison, where I am now, to visit for a few days and talk research. So far so good, though my host and I are both fighting throat conditions with coughs (his cough being much more severe than mine). We had some nice Nepalese food last night, with a few fun grad students. I'll be here until Wednesday, when I continue my journey to my grandmother's place for Thanksgiving.
But for now I must shower so I can venture out into the wide world and get some coffee.... my host, he is not a coffee-at-home guy, and I can't wait until he's ready to go for brunch (probably not till lunch time). | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I am sleepy. Yesterday I sat down to write a talk based on part of my solo research paper, and read a proof that assumed something not true. I wonder where this came from. It is a section that is more heavily changed from the original paper than most, so I thought perhaps it was an incomplete changeover, but no, it's not in the original either. I am forced to conclude it was an opium dream. Too bad it couldn't have been Kubla Khan.
Anyway, after much stress I fixed the problem, and with a minimum of disruption to the paper as written. I still have to do the edits, but they shouldn't be too painful. The only fretsome part is that I had already sent this preprint to a big shot in my area, so I'll have to email again, tail between my legs.
I am not just sleepy from that, though. It was a long weekend - I got an email from a friend today and thought "wow, it's been a long time since I wrote him"; I even momentarily felt a little guilty. Then I started reading his note and realized I wrote him Friday. Both Friday and Saturday night I stayed up until the wee hours being social, Friday at a friend's house for her birthday, Saturday at a bar for the football game. Saturday afternoon I spent at the mall with a friend from Indy and two of her children, so I didn't sleep in between my late nights. Then yesterday I stayed up extra-late for a weeknight for me (i.e., 11 pm), and got up to go over my talk again (actually, I completely rewrote it) before giving it at 9:30. After that talk I wrote its sequel for Wednesday, finished up one for next week, and played with some other research. That finishes my talk quota for the calendar year.
Tonight I plan to retire early and not set the alarm. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Roadside America is a treasure trove. I found some things I'd like to see while I'm home over Christmas.
There's a sculpture garden in Dewey, IL (a town I'd never heard of). Arcola has the One and Only Hippie Memorial, which is 62 feet long. And of course Mattoon has the Burger King, which successfully resisted the fast food chain's effort to get it to change its name. Finally, Gays (near Mattoon) has a two-story outhouse.
I wonder who I can get to go with me...
Edit: looks like except for Dewey they are in a line. Mattoon's about an hour away, and Arcola is right on the path about halfway in between. Gays is just a little past Mattoon. Could be: drive to Mattoon, have lunch at the Burger King, drop by Gays, and stop in Arcola for a while on the way back. Sounds like a pleasant afternoon to me. :-) | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| I made it to the Fort St Joseph Museum today! They had some nice things - the pictographs by Sitting Bull were cool, though only four originals were on display (the others were photos of the originals; they rotate them for preservation reasons). All followed the pattern: Sitting Bull rides horse and kills enemy. My favorite was the Crow enemy, in full chief's garb, which meant with his arms out to the sides he had wings: feathers hanging down all along his sleeves. To my surprise, although they did have a postcard of the museum itself, they didn't have any of any of the objects in the museum. I would definitely have bought some Sitting Bull Kicking Ass postcards.
Other highlights for me were information on the Underground Railroad in Niles, antique toys (dolls... so creeeeeepy...), and six antique sewing machines. Two of them stitched in a line proceeding to the side rather than to the front, which I'd never seen.
The real highlight, of course, was the two-headed lamb. Not in a jar, instead it was inexpertly taxidermied (you could see the stitching that held its mouths closed). It had two essentially complete heads, one looking forward and the other over its right shoulder, joined near the back of the skull. It was kind of cute, actually.
After that we had lunch at the Irish pub downtown, where we both had dishes with lamb and then split a deep-fried Mars bar. It was wrapped in dough, oddly chewy, very sweet, and served with a really strong Bailey's sauce. We concluded it was good but probably neither of us ever needed to eat another one. The outing concluded with a trip to the Indian grocery, where I acquired several large plastic packages of spices: garam masala and curry powder, cumin seed, black cardamom, maybe something else, as well as carrot preserves and a jar of ginger paste. Mmmmm. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| I finished World War Z last night and thought about starting it over again, but decided I probably didn't want to read it twice in immediate succession. I think I may try to find a copy of The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I've read a short story version, which I think must be "A Separate War" based on Internet searching, and remember being very impressed. Apparently it's allegorical to Vietnam, which will probably go mostly over my head, but the story itself gets high marks even from others of my generation.
As for actual history, with two recommendations, Devil in the White City will make it onto my TBR list. I also plan to check out some Studs Terkel. In high school I was in the musical Working, based on his book of the same name, but I've never read any of this stuff. He has, for example, a book called Hard Times, which is an oral history of the Depression. (actually last night I discovered, having thought of Studs Terkel yesterday afternoon, that Max Brooks thanks him as one of his inspirations for World War Z)
Perhaps I'll get into reading again for a while. I used to be voracious, but that dropped off in college, when I started reading pretty much only on summer vacation. Since moving to a year-round schedule my reading has dropped off too. I brought only four fiction books with me to Indiana: one a Moomintroll book and three collections of SF short stories. I brought just as many books on fitness! Well, there are plenty of books in the house I'm renting if I run out - including The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, one of the many seminal feminist books I've been thinking I'd like to have read. Not necessarily to read, but to have read.
Anyway, I'm blathering now, so I'll stop. :-) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| An odd-sounding comparison, but an interesting (short) article. A prisoner sentenced to life without parole is in a worse situation than one with only six months remaining in his sentence. But it is this latter prisoner who is more likely to attempt to escape. The anticipation of freedom, of a better life, is so strong that he can no longer wait.
I was on campus for my first-ever tailgate event this Saturday - I saw the Glee Club (with alumni) sing before the game and then had lunch on campus before walking home (which, as it turns out, takes an hour). Two friends in from Chicago for the game had given me a ride to campus that morning. After the game I headed to T&K's house for dinner. I played with the daughters of my Little Rock friends (one of whom is a Glee Club alum, hence them being in town this particular weekend) until the four game-goers got back. It was very pleasant.
I'm just over halfway through World War Z now. It's really well-written. The format is "oral history", so it's written as a sequence of interviews with people, from ordinary citizens to military to doctors to administration. This makes it a little dangerous for reading before bed, because I think "oh, just one more, they're short." There is just enough background knowledge taken for granted (such as nicknames for the zombies) and the right balance of consistency and contradiction in different people's stories to make it feel real. He's done a really good job with giving different people different voices. I can see why the friend who lent it to me said it invaded his consciousness - he's read it twice and says he still sometimes looks around rooms he's in with thoughts of zombie defensibility. I came to a discussion of rating people based on their skills and started wondering what rating I would get - the very useful were doctors and people who can fix things, for example, whereas an investment banker who never did his own home repairs or anything like that would be the bottom rank.
Yesterday I bought tickets to go to Iceland in January. I'll be staying with my friend there and his roommate, whom I don't know. I am hoping to see the aurora borealis, but otherwise I'm letting my plans wait until Christmas break. My friend will be really busy with work through the end of the year, so after that he can help make plans too. Very exciting!
And now I must make a handout for my seminar series... four talks down, three to go! | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| This dress is AMAZING. Love the deco look.
These guys win Halloween. Especially pinging ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) thewhitedragon here.
A steampunk wedding. Awesome. I bookmarked the blog, too, because it looks interesting. More steampunk cakes here (a full picture of the one in the previous link may be found a bit down under "How about some Steampunk wedding cakes?").
I've been a little heavy on the link posts lately, I know, but I think I'm still recovering from Blogtoberfest. Well, that and I've been spending more time than usual rotting away on the Interwebs. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I just got off the phone with my insurance. I had gotten a Remittance Advice for something they had paid twice to my hospital early this year, and called the hospital since I didn't get any money from insurance and thus shouldn't be responsible for paying them back. They said they would take care of it and in fact already have a payment pending. Well, since actually I had already gotten two notices (they went to work and the secretary didn't forward me anything until last week), I decided to be safe I'd call my insurance anyway. Well, I had barely finished describing what happened when the lady just jumped on it, asked me for the ID number on the letters and what department they were from so she could have someone figure out why I was getting repayment bills for things I hadn't been paid in the first place. She got my number and said when she found something out she'd let me know.
The bill was just over $60 so monetarily I'm not worried about having to pay it (the hospital apparently processes their repayments from highest amount to lowest, so who knows when mine will be done), but I certainly don't want something I shouldn't even owe to go to collections.
I've been pretty pleased with Anthem in general, in terms of what they cover and how easy it has been to deal with them (the fact that I go to a big hospital where a pretty high percentage of patients have Anthem probably doesn't hurt anything), but this was unexpectedly good customer service. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| I forgot one of my favorite comments from my Halloween movie experience. I was told that the original version of The Thing is not scary at all, because "The Thing looks like a giant carrot".
Here is a news release from a New Zealand Anglican church in reaction to Pope Benedict's recent invitation to Anglicans to "come home" to the Catholic church.
In other religious news, looking at my niece's pages and groups on FB introduces me to Christian groups I'd never before heard of. The most recent is Leeland, who actually seem really cool and genuine. Anyone who says that seeing Bono speak in a "very anointed" way was an inspiration is okay by me. And along the way they remind us that spaces are important. In particular, "apart" and "a part" are not synonyms. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Tags: | movies | | Subject: | Carpenter's The Thing | | Time: | 04:17 pm |
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| The Halloween movie of choice was John Carpenter's 1982 version of The Thing. I'm not so much for horror movies, but I've read the short story this is based on ("Who Goes There?" by John W Campbell, Jr) so I was actually quite interested to see it. A young, hirsute Kurt Russell didn't sound like a bad idea either.
A couple of thoughts early on - if this is Antarctica in the winter, shouldn't it be a heck of a lot darker? Also, whoever trained their dogs was amazing, and the one featured dog was quite an actor. I never knew a husky running through the snow looked quite so much like a fish, though.
( A cut is a way to not have to worry about spoilers. ) | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Ooh, these were meant for the previous entry. First, Sean Scully is, in fact, everywhere. He was at Dartmouth, he was in Munich, he was in Dublin, and now he's at Notre Dame. I mean, one of his paintings.
The following text was from a placard in the Iroquois Beadwork display.
The wall pocket in the shape of a lady's slipper was most probably made by a Tuscarora artist during the peak of slipper-shaped wall pocket popularity between 1868 and 1875.
I did not know slipper-shaped wall pockets had a peak of popularity. The things you learn. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Well, well, here we are again, and I have two posts in mind. This one is just about my weekend. Friday I went out for Fluid Dynamics, a bunch of math profs out for beers. That was gratifyingly fun, especially after someone said he doesn't go because the one time he did everyone just talked departmental politics and he left early. This time there was a lot of US politics discussed, but very little of the departmental sort. I had chicken strips fried in some kind of beer batter, like you'd typically see on fish. They were good, but greasy. I went home and did a little research, and had very strange dreams all night long.
Saturday I played on FB for a while before my evening plans, which were dinner and a movie at the home of the grad student who has been making an effort to include me, for the which I am already planning her Christmas present. We had individual pita pizzas and I brought sliced apples, caramel dip, and crushed peanuts. We ended up watching the first half of the football game before turning on The Thing. My thoughts on that movie are for a separate post. For a while there were six of us, the hostess and her husband, another married couple from the department, me, and a CS person, but the non-hosting marrieds left before the movie.
Today I went to the Halloween stores to see what they had on sale and made some small purchases for future use. Then I came into campus to go to the art museum, which had the opening reception for two special exhibits this afternoon. It was pleasant. There was a huge spread, though I didn't eat much of it, and the non-water beverage option was lime sherbet punch, which was delicious. I went to the first of the two gallery talks, which was by the artist, who is a professor here. The second one I skipped; it was going to be two curators talking about a photography exhibit drawn from the permanent collection that was huge and (IMO) stretched both the stated topic and the medium - there were a few inclusions that were not photographs, or made by some piece of the photographic process, as far as I could tell. So instead I finished my tour of the rest of the museum, which I had started before the reception.
Tonight I'm going to think about research again. Maybe I'll get somewhere.... there is a significant sticking point thus far that seems to be the same regardless of approach; tonight I'll try approach 3 and see what I can do with it... | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Happy Halloween, everyone! Amazing as it seems, Blogtoberfest ends today. I managed to post an average of 1.2 times per day, with only 3 missed days (and, I believe, only two meta-posts counting this one), so we'll call that a win.
It was an interesting exercise. I like to think I didn't stoop to pointless posts too often (at least no more pointless than my usual fare), though it was sometimes difficult to think of things to write -- luckily there are enough memes out there that when I did do them I could cherrypick ones about which I had something real to say.
Anyway, I shall not continue daily posting into November, for which some of you may breathe a sigh of relief. :-) I think I will try to continue posting at least a few times a week, though. It's a nice exercise; I just don't want to carry it to the point where I have to stockpile ideas for dry days or fish through all the meme pages on a regular basis.
If you have any feedback about the Blogtoberfest experience from the outside, I'd love to hear it - what you liked, what you will be happy to let go, and any other comments. (not sure what I'm expecting here so if no one comments I won't be too surprised) | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Since the museum was closed for heating repairs yesterday, you'll have to wait for the two-headed lamb report. Meanwhile, on this penultimate day of Blogtoberfest, I have for you some ramblings on handedness.
I call myself left-handed, because that's how I write, but it's not quite correct. Ambidextrous is also not the right label. Many tasks are done almost exclusively by one hand, just not uniformly the same hand. Trung used to say it was like the communist system: spread out the work for maximal incompetence. I was never particularly amused by that comment.
Here's my list:
* Left: writing (exclusive), tooth brushing (exclusive), texting (preferential), cutting with big knives (preferential), pouring (preferential)
* Right: cutting with scissors (exclusive), hand sewing (preferential, though I do it just as well with my left), wielding hand tools like screwdrivers (preferential), cutting with little knives (by habit; I eat in the Continental fashion)
* Either indiscriminately: sweeping and raking, pinning fabric, stirring (if I'm holding a bowl in my arm, preferentially right, and if I'm holding a pot handle, preferentially left)
I don't play sports so I can't talk about throwing a ball. How about you all? | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Soon I will go home, figure out what to make for dinner, and see if I can work out an idea I had this afternoon for a proof. Or see why it doesn't work, or in what way I need to be more clever if it is going to have a hope of working. This is round two, of course. My original idea was way too simple and involved some significant rookie mistakes, so this is already the "be more clever" version of that.
It is possible that tomorrow I will go to the Fort St. Joseph museum up in Niles. I am very excited about that. Two-headed lamb! Stuffed, or in a jar? Also, the person I'm going with is lending me a zombie book. I can't remember the name or author but I'll keep y'all posted.
Perhaps that is enough. As per usual, I have begun backing up some files on my thumb drive at about the time I'm ready to leave, trapping me in the office for a while. Woo fun. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Questions from That's My Answer!, because they're fun today.
1. What's the one thing your hometown does better than anywhere else?
2. What game show do you feel confident that you could host as a fill-in?
3. How often do you need to use a calculator?
4. Have you ever been to Niagra Falls?
5. What is your favorite food that begins with a 'W'?
1. This is hard. I would say "blue October skies", but that's really the whole region. I'm gonna go with "lots of things to do, with small-town convenience".
2. I would be likely to freeze up on any game show, but I think Jeopardy would be the best for me because Alex doesn't have to be artificially enthusiastic.
3. I rarely use a calculator because my research almost never uses difficult numbers, if I need to do arithmetic I usually do it by hand, and if I need to do calculation for a class I'm teaching I generally use a computer algebra program like Maple. I do have a scientific calculator that I really like, though, especially for its fraction-manipulation abilities.
4. I've never been to Niagra Falls, though I think I got a spam ad for it once. I've also never been to Niagara Falls.
5. I suppose saying something like "warm cookies" would be cheating. Walnuts, maybe? Ooh - someone on the site said waffles. I think I have to go with that. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
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