My Musings

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Tuesday, October 11, 2005

A New Link!

For those of you who are sick and tired of waiting for me to update my blog, you can give Stephen's a shot. It's the link called "Tacky Rude and Vulgar," up above in my links section. If you don't think a blog with a title like that is a surefire hit for quality humor, then ... you probably have good taste. But otherwise, give it a read.

.: posted by Boris 11:31 AM

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Coincidences

When I was ten or so, my dad once gave me a lecture about the inner workings of a toilet. Nevertheless he claims he loves me, and so does my mom, so once or twice a semester they visit me at college. They bring me food and take me out to eat and listen to me gripe about the cafeteria. (Try subsisting on a quasi-digestible mixture of grease and salt for a while and see how it affects YOUR conversation habits.) Then they weep mournfully as they come to terms, yet again, with what a bore their son has turned out to be, and thus a Saturday is lost to them forever. My mom is wonderful because I tell her to bring a few choice culinary items (Pringles, Easy Mac) and she brings me the Snack aisle of the supermarket stuffed in a suitcase. My parents are great. Without them, I would starve.

Coincidence #1: My parents visited me yesterday. So did Regina’s.

Coincidence #2: Walking down the street after lunch, my parents and I ran into Regina and her parents. We were killing time before our play began, and so were they.

My parents and Regina’s had never been formally introduced, but they’re all Russian so they got along famously. We chatted for a while and parted ways. I convinced my parents to go to the mall, where my dad, still probably suffering a little guilt over the toilet lecture, bought me a board game. My mom bought ridiculously expensive and unnecessary crap, but my dad and I know better than to challenge the utility of her purchases. Men fly like leaves in the wind before the awesome might of a woman’s iron logic. (“Ilana, you have sixteen pairs of pants. Why did you buy another?” “DUUUUHHHHH! Look at the TAG! They normally cost seventy-eight dollars, but I got them on sale for seventy!”)

In retrospect, one might have predicted that something titled “Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure” would be pretty awful. It wasn’t even a play: it was Dave Gorman himself, talking about an unusual eight weeks of his life. He was British and his story had some amusing parts, but unfortunately the parts that weren’t amusing were serious, and it was during these that Dave often chose to forgo speaking for yelling, and the sound system was set up such that his yelling had the effect on me as though a 322-pound lumberjack named Huey was attempting to reorganize the molecules of my eardrums with an ice pick.

A “Googlewhack” is when you type two words into Google — no quotes — and only one hit shows up. Dave’s story begins when he is procrastinating on a novel. Someone sends him an email informing him that he is a Googlewhack (that is, someone found a Googlewhack and his website was the one hit), whereupon Dave finds a Googlewhack himself and emails that person, and that person finds the next Googlewhack, and so on; and then Dave ends up flying all over the world in an effort to meet ten Googlewhacks. It’s a lot more complicated than that, as you will see if ever you hate yourself enough to watch this woeful “play,” but that’s the gist, and if nothing else it’s a remarkable story about the dangers of procrastination. From what I could tell, Dave never did get started on that novel, and instead wrote a book about this Googlewhacking shit.

Just a tip: if you ever meet a bearded British fellow named Dave Gorman, forget about tact and rudeness for a moment and run away immediately. He is not stable. When he said at the end of the “play” that he’d be hanging out at the bar if anybody wanted to chat, I fled the theater on legs that could have overrun a cheetah.

And yes, it is possible to find Googlewhacks. I could give you some examples from the “play,” but unfortunately they aren’t Googlewhacks anymore, because of Dave’s book and the mysterious popularity of his show. My favorite is one that Dave found himself, and the one that got him started on his quest: dork turnspit. If you try to find any Googlewhacks yourself, you will quickly realize how remarkable it is that two such ordinary words could be a winner. I ultimately had to resort to intersexed fascinum. See if you can find one that makes do with simpler vocabulary.

Of course, I can’t complain too much about the Googlewhacking, because the alternative, which Regina saw, was “Menopause: the Musical.” As a male, I can imagine nothing more terrible than sitting in a theater for two hours and watching a production that concerns itself entirely with music. I hate musicals. Every musical ever made, however good, would have been better without music and should have been written as a play, except for Gigi, which was just so awful it should never have been made into anything, and we ought to exhume the corpse of its creator and burn it to ensure she doesn’t inflict any more harm upon the universe, as well as the corpses of all the actors who played on opening night (just to be safe).

If you don’t believe me, see for yourself. Try tacking on “the Musical” to any random movie you can think of — say, The Terminator, so now we have, “Terminator: the Musical” — and observe what happens:

Someday, I’ll be back, maybe.
Until then, Hasta la Vista, Baby.

It just doesn’t work.

If it was “Menopause: the Play,” I might have actually wanted to go see it. My mom — who is young, beautiful, wise, intelligent, and also might be reading this — has not had menopause yet, and I happily won’t be anywhere near her when she does; I can only suppose its effects on her will be staggeringly frightful. Yesterday, for instance, there was loud music playing in the theater, and five minutes before the play was due to start, my mom complained to the house manager that she didn’t like the music. Instead of, you know, moving a few rows back. Throw in menopause, and I conjecture she would have burst into tears before ripping the speakers out of the wall with her teeth. A play about such women, I think, would have been delightfully amusing.

Coincidence #3: We had a 7:30 reservation at a Japanese restaurant for dinner, and when we walked in, we saw, for the second time that day, Herman Melville. Who had been reincarnated and come back to life in the form of Regina and her parents.

My parents and I had been to this restaurant several times before, but we went again because 1) it’s good, and 2) there aren’t many restaurants you can go to in Cleveland. I mean, you can go to them, but you won’t be able to get back. For those of you who are from Columbus and erroneously believe that Cleveland is approximately the same thing, let me clear things up.

In Columbus, roads generally follow what are termed “straight lines,” and intersect each other at so-called “ninety-degree angles.” In Cleveland, however, almost all the roads are arcs, and the typical intersection consists of eight or nine of them. This setup makes following even Mapquest directions difficult, because in addition to ordinary commands like “left” and “right,” you must deal with gradations: slight left, gradual left, middling left, Post-Modern left, and so on. Mess one up and you’re in Iowa. But even worse than the confusing directions is the gap between directions. In Columbus, you just “go straight” until the next instruction. In Cleveland, you “stay on the same road,” which may seem like just another synonym of “go straight” until you realize that “staying on the same road” in Cleveland for as little as a hundred feet can involve any number of U-turns, 180s, gradual lefts, tangential lefts, Neo-Classical rights, and so on. The arcing roads intersect at such small angles that going straight at any intersection is almost guaranteed to get you off your current road and into Iowa.

Let me illustrate. A typical driving scenario in Columbus might be, “Turn right on Barkley, 2.0 miles,” and so you turn right on Barkley and go straight for two miles and then follow the next instruction. A typical driving scenario in Cleveland might be, “Turn slight right on Oatfield, 2.0 miles,” and so you turn what you hope is a slight right onto what you hope is Oatfield, but you’re not sure if it was slight enough (or too slight), but you don’t have time to think about that now because here all of a sudden is a six-street intersection and you can go ten different directions, “straight” being none of them, and is the road curving left or right, and is it fifteen degrees or twenty, or dang, 17.5 is also looking like it might be the one, and you’re driving thirty-five miles an hour so you have maybe half a second to decide. Boom, Iowa.

It goes without saying that in Cleveland there are no street signs. Anywhere. You never even realize that you’re lost until you are in Iowa. Basically, do any substantial driving in Cleveland, and you’re in Iowa. My parents and I have been to Iowa many times, and never on purpose. The only way to avoid this problem is to not drive very far, but unfortunately, that means the only dining option we have is Coventry, a rather seedy shopping district full of cramped shops that sell used videogames and miscellaneous odds and ends like books titled Everybody Poops. Pacific East, amazingly, is a great restaurant and I don’t know what the hell it’s doing in that area, and so I guess it isn’t too surprising that two sushi-loving families would both select it.

The point being, we got a big table together and made fun of Regina for being the only person who ate chicken instead of sushi. Chicken! At a Japanese restaurant! And this coming from the big Japanese buff, who likes Anime and video games and…uh, what else are the Japanese good for? Well, watching Anime in the original Japanese (with subtitles) is enough to label someone a Japanese culture buff in my book, so I was nothing short of appalled when Regina ordered chicken. Yes, I learned a very important lesson that day, as I dipped my yellowtail roll into the soy sauce and Regina futzed with her pathetic chicken, and that was this: although some people may appear to be one thing and you think of them in a certain way, when you really get down to it, when you start to think a little deeper about the things that truly count, you realize that despite all outward appearances, I still hadn’t asked Regina about

Coincidence #4: Matt my suitemate, who plays D&D on Saturdays, and Matt the guy who is the DM (Dungeon Master) for Regina’s Saturday D&D sessions, are in fact the same person. And don’t ask me how I know what DM stands for. It’s common knowledge, all right!

Regina first proposed the idea in an email that morning, but I wrote it off as impossible because I knew that Matt was merely a player in his group, not the DM. Nevertheless, curiosity prevailed and Regina and I attempted to discern over dinner whether my Matt and her Matt were one person. I plied Regina with details about my Matt’s personality, but she told me that she didn’t actually know very much about her Matt — apparently, the bonds between D&D players are not as deep as I had thought. (Regina explained to me that she didn’t necessarily know any of her fellow players very well, but that she knew their characters intimately. I pounded my forehead with my palm and cried a little bit before continuing with the conversation.)

Next we tried to give each other a detailed physical description of our Matts. It turned out we were both incompetent. All I could say about my Matt was that he was roughly six feet tall, shaven, and round-faced. Regina said that she was 5’1” and therefore everybody looked six feet to her, but that her Matt was shaven and had blondish hair. Even though I lived with Matt for two years, I have no idea what his hair color is. When it comes to hair color, I won’t remember it unless it’s green or on fire. So all we had to go on was that Matt was shaven and didn’t wear glasses — which actually rules out a lot more men at this school than you might think — but we still weren’t absolutely sure.

Next I asked Regina if there was a guy named Ethan in her group, because Ethan is the DM for Matt’s games. She said, “Well, we were supposed to have an Ethan — we’re actually playing Ethan’s world — but he got really addicted to World of Warcraft…” and I knew it couldn’t be anybody else.

Incidentally, there was a D&D session that very evening, so after my parents drove away I dropped by Clarke to pay Matt a visit on the tenth floor, which the D&D gaming group unofficially takes over every Saturday. Ten or so people sat around a big square table, dice and character sheets at the ready. Matt was surprised to see me, so I filled him in on the amazing coincidence and chatted with him about Ethan’s recent gaming addiction.

The guy sitting on Matt’s right, a somewhat chubby fellow with a round, stubbly face, had just completed a Mayan-style step pyramid out of dice. Sporting a 4x4 base, it was a fairly impressive structure. The kid to Matt’s left was enjoying the company of his gaming friends by sitting with his eyeballs buried in a laptop. He turned his head just long enough to see that the Builder had recently finished a monster project, and congratulated his friend on this remarkable achievement by chucking a fancy many-sided die at it. The athletic throw belied his pale skin and hefty glasses, and a delicious *KRAK!* sent a mountain of brown dice raining to the floor, where they blended nicely with the dark threads of the carpet.

“Find ALL of them.” Apparently they were Matt’s dice. “Or you’re going to pay for it.”

“But it wasn’t my fault,” the Builder whimpered.

“Pick them up. You’re the one who built the pyramid,” Matt said.

“My building it is not to blame for its subsequent destruction,” the Builder said, but he bent down anyway and started looking for the dice. After some time and much grumbling, he found most of the dice and heaped them in a gigantic pile on the table. There were enough dice in that pile to power every single one of my board games and still have enough left over to erect a small igloo.

Matt looked up from his pages and glanced at the heaping mound of dice. It took him a quarter of a second to note, “You’re missing one.” The last die, it turned out, was buried in a dark crevice under a propped-up organic chemistry textbook lying on the ground. Fishing out the die, the Builder said, “I hate O-chem,” and I wasn’t sure if that was because it was a hard subject, or because its textbook had hidden one of the precious dice. The villain was absorbed once more in his computer. Matt seemed ready to start the session, so I bade him goodbye and wished him luck on his campaign.

Dungeons & Dragons, for all its weirdness and creepiness, is a game I’ve always had a dark craving to try. It IS a board game, after all, and I like board games, and D&D is supposed to be pretty good. Sure, sometimes people use D&D to hold satanic rituals or dress up like vampires, but the game itself is supposed to just be about going around and killing stuff, which sounds like nothing if not the perfect game. I thought about asking Matt if I could join, but his group already had a lot of people in it, and they were in the middle of a scenario, and if I joined I would be new and they’d have to explain stuff to me, and I didn’t see any extra chairs, and the table space was kind of limited too, and I didn’t know if they could spare any character sheets, and my horoscope said not to try anything new that day, and many other reasons, so I couldn’t ask. Earlier, Regina had essentially made it painfully clear that my request would be well received if I would only make it, but when the big moment came, doubt seeped into my mind and my tongue suddenly failed to work itself up to the challenge. Playing D&D is kind of like eating food at somebody else’s house: you really want to do it, but you don’t feel comfortable unless the host practically forces you.

So I didn’t ask if I could play, and I guess that means the coincidences didn’t amount to much. My mouth was already open, though, so I said goodbye again and walked back to the elevator.

.: posted by Boris 11:07 PM

Friday, September 09, 2005

Another Blog Poll

Another petty argument, this time with Andy. So leave chessmen15 a message and tell me: which video is more idiotic, this one or this one?

I must admit that the humor content in both of them is rather lacking. It is clear, however, that whoever made the hobbit video actually has TALENT. Taking dialogue clips from an actual movie and fitting them to music like that is no simple task. Whereas the Kenya thing is just plain garbage.

Remember, you're voting on which one is MORE idiotic!

.: posted by Boris 9:45 PM

Friday, September 02, 2005

On the Way to a Game of Foursquare

Matt: "I'm really glad you got a new ball; the old one was lopsided."
Kevin: "What are you talking about? The other ball was fine."
Matt: "It was lopsided."
Kevin: "Matt, balls can't be lopsided. They're full of air, and there's no such thing as lopsided air."
Matt: "The ball can still be lopsided if the outside of it caves in."
Kevin: "No it can't! If the skin caves in, the ball will simply shrink. A ball can get bigger or smaller, but the air is evenly distributed and so it can never get lopsided."

[argument continues in this vein until Matt gets tired of arguing and says:]
Matt: "The fact is, I've seen lopsided balls and I played with them!"

Matt initially responded to our uproarious laughter by kicking Kevin repeatedly in the shins. When he realized that this course of action wasn't stopping us from giggling like hyperactive schoolgirls, Matt stalked off to his room and locked the door behind him. We never did play foursquare.

.: posted by Boris 11:31 PM

Saturday, August 06, 2005

Girls: Do They Have Any Taste in Girls?

This evening I got into a really pathetic argument with Yana. She was engaged in the highly noble and admirable pastime of ogling online photos of a hot chick she's never met. I naturally became excited and demanded links. The girl was indeed pretty, but I couldn't resist showing Yana some photos of a girl I thought I was even prettier. Yana disagreed. We began a petty quarrel.

Please, therefore, leave me an IM (chessmen15) telling me who you think is prettier: the girl pictured here and here or the girl pictured in the middle there and on the right there.

Remember, Shift + click opens links in a new window, which might be handy. And before you say it, yes, I am a sad pathetic disgusting no-life wretched loser. Just vote please.

.: posted by Boris 10:25 PM

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Java Can Die

There was only one point in my life when I hated math. That was in calc 3, when we got to triple integrals. Regular integrals back in calc 1 were great; double integrals in calc 3 I could handle; but it's that third integral that got me. I wanted to burn math.

Right now I'm having a similar experience with programming. My dad's random friend somewhere asked me to write a simple program, the one catch being that the program has to be in Java. I could write the program in .2 seconds in C++, but in Java I can't even correctly manage the part where you ask the user for the name of the file and the user types it in and hits enter and you store the name in a variable. I tried everything: reading the textbook, ripping code from online tutorials, bathing my cat in cow organs, but nothing works. And now I want to burn computer science.

Please, may I never have an experience that makes me want to burn writing.

.: posted by Boris 12:54 AM

Thursday, May 19, 2005

[Do you ever look through your "blog" folder and find weird things you don't ever remember having written? And then post them in your blog anyway, even though they were written a year ago and no longer bear any relevance? Me too.]

The Toilet Paper

Here at Case, there is a “publication” called The Toilet Paper. Basically, the Toilet Paper is a page-long, humorous, fake-newspaper thing that a handful of kids print out periodically and then tape to the inside of toilet stalls.

Last night I was alone in the bathroom, getting ready to brush my teeth. Well, not quite alone — the door to one of the stalls was closed, with somebody (I assumed) inside. You can fill in the rest. I was squeezing toothpaste onto my brush when the stall door opened and Kevin emerged, saying, “That was crappy.”

“What?” I asked, struck by the irony of somebody using the adjective “crappy” after exiting a toilet.

“Back there,” Kevin replied. I looked. He was pointing to the stall from which he had just arrived. Now I got scared. My eyebrows involuntarily shot up in alarm as I desperately tried to figure out what on Earth Kevin, who had but seconds ago finished using a toilet, could possibly have experienced in recent memory that might be described as “crappy,” other than an unpleasant bowel movement. Was he really going to tell me about it? I wanted to run, but the grip of shock and a toothbrush in my mouth held me firmly in place.

“That…Toilet Paper…thingy. It sucked,” Kevin replied. Relieved that Kevin was not going to tell me about his defecation disasters, I made some comment about how it’s hard to be consistently funny, which Kevin didn’t understand at all because I had toothpaste in my mouth. So I repeated myself, except I don’t think Kevin understood it the second time, either, and then he turned on the noisy hand dryer to discourage me from further speech. Then he left.

.: posted by Boris 6:48 PM

Monday, May 16, 2005

Instead

I have decided not to finish the Israel story, because it's not all that exciting, and because almost a year has passed since the actual trip and I've forgotten nearly everything. I now possess great admiration for people who go places and then write about it, because I can never seem to get it done. As far as this blog goes: NO MORE WRITING ABOUT VACATIONS!

Instead I offer some quotes from the professors I had this semester.

Systems Programming:

-- "What's the format of the test?"
"Well, we're gonna have some problems."

-- "We assume if it works on the test data, it works on everything."

Milton:

-- "In the middle of an orgasm, nobody's talking in iambic pentameter."
-- "Today, you can all go to hell."
-- "I've gotta stop giggling. It's the drugs."

AI:

-- "By the way, the use of global variables is highly encouraged to ease programming."
[Sorry, there were more, but I accidentally threw away my AI notes :(]

Econ:

-- "Now, potentially I would have had more fun doing my homework than watching Queen Latifah do anything."
-- "I ... AM the pretzel king."
-- "This is like, you never thought you'd need it, but a twelve-foot ruler would be really handy right about now."
-- "There's nothing I like more than staying up three nights in a row and then going on a long, boring drive through the country."
-- "Nobody steals '88 [Chevy] Novas. Because of their superior anti-theft mechanisms, obviously."

English Lit:

-- "I've done three co-ghost-written stories about very interesting Tibetans."
-- "It was the most explicit sexual description I have ever read. And I have read a lot of them."
-- "Who doesn't love necrophilia?"
-- "In fact, you may be bullshitting me, but it's okay."
-- "Can you imagine being in such a state of sexual arousal that a well-turned table leg would turn you on?"

And the best one of them all:

"If you got a great Dane, would you name him Hamlet?"

.: posted by Boris 9:29 PM

Monday, January 03, 2005

Israel, Part...What Part Are We On? Five? No, Four

I neglected to mention this before, so I think I’ll mention it now, since I’ve already given up all pretense of maintaining chronological order: Yana is extremely tall. Like, almost as tall as me, and I’m almost six feet, which isn’t anything special for a guy but pretty huge for a girl. Thankfully most of the activities on the trip discouraged high heels, or else Yana would have definitely towered over me and I would have felt horribly insecure. Strangely, Yana seemed to be ashamed of her height, and I was eternally amused. There’s one picture where she and Marina are standing next to each other with their backs to a rock wall; in it Yana is slouching so severely that if the photographer hadn’t caught her legs shooting WAY the heck off to the side, not the keenest observer could have told by looking at the picture that one of the girls is at least nine inches taller than the other. Yana later told me she had a picture with Marina where she didn’t slouch, the end result being that she looked like Shaquille O’Neal standing next to a midget five year-old. She cut that picture up, burned it, and fed the ashes to her lizard, despite my wailing, tearful protests.

Tuesday night a guy named Neil Lazarus came to speak to us about the political situation in Israel and the Middle East. As you may well surmise, said political situation is not a particularly happy or uplifting subject to dwell on for an hour, but Neil handily got around that sour point by not actually talking about the political situation, and instead cracking an endless stream of jokes; and at one point, making us stand up and give shoulder rubs to each other. From the little that Neil did speak on the depressing matter during the occasional pauses between one-liners, I got the impression that affairs in Israel and the Middle East are: very bad.

One of Neil’s keenest and most insightful points was that when Israelis say the word “peace,” it sounds like “piss.” Numerous potty jokes ensue: “We want piss in the Middle East,” etc.

After Neil’s speech, everyone was in a gloomy, contemplative mood, so we all dressed up and went to the disco to get smashed and dance. I don’t know what strings were pulled or sexual favors performed, but somehow Shabbat & Crew managed at the last minute to rent us a discotheque for a few hours — just us, a bartender, and a hot bartender. The itinerary says we were supposed to have a bonfire that night, but I’m pretty sure we ended up having it some other night. Or maybe we snuck it in there somehow. Anyway the bonfire, whenever it happened, wasn’t too exciting. We talked, cooked potatoes, roasted marshmallows, and chilled in front of the fire, but the meat of the evening lay in singing popular Jewish songs; and when we ran out of those, singing unpopular Jewish songs that nobody but one person in the group had ever heard of; and when we ran out of those, singing pop songs; and ever since then the United Nations has been in session heatedly debating which of the three was most torturous.

Also I had to pee really bad and ended up going in the woods. Sometime after I had returned to the fire, I talked to Ben, a cool guy who Yana wouldn’t admit to having a monster crush on, even though she clearly did, and I think he wanted her too, so there’s a brilliant opportunity lost forever to the whirling sandstorm of time; and Ben said he had to pee as well, so we had a really intellectual conversation.

“Just go over there,” I said, pointing in the direction of the vast, empty woods. “It’s far away from everybody. That’s where I went.”

“Yes, but if I go over there, I might step in your urinal.” By far the highlight of the evening.

Anyway, the disco. There was a nice patio area perfect for puking and escaping the loud music. Inside the club itself there were three rooms. The room to the right had a dance floor and sound equipment, well-stocked with hideously loud speakers and an overflowing repertoire of terrible music. The room to the left had benches along the outer wall, plus plush red curtains with which two (or more) lusty patrons could shield themselves from prying eyes whilst making sweet love. The middle room was simply a bar.

Quickly after our arrival, the music was pumped up to a volume that directly interfered with my heretofore formidable will to live. To talk to anyone you pretty much had to scream right into their eyeballs; I don’t know how people are supposed to be social at these things. For a little while I stood around idly, feeling terribly underdressed and wondering why my female comrades, who were elegantly dressed and looked very pretty, were willing to be seen with me.

I should probably add that the drinking age in Israel is 18. Actually, just about every other country in the known universe except for the United States has a drinking age of 18. Ours is set at 21 so that 18-, 19-, and 20 year-olds have something to be excited about when they visit foreign countries. And indeed I was excited, because that night at the disco was the first time I had ever consumed alcohol outside my parents’ supervision. Out of respect for my Russian heritage, I chose as my first-ever bought drink vodka. Actually acquiring the drink, however, took about half an hour, because there wasn’t really any sort of a line system at the field-goal shaped bar and both bartenders pointedly ignored me as I quietly sat there, slowly going deaf. My foul indignation reached a breaking point when I saw Brad arrive at the bar after me and get one, two, THREE drinks while I got nary a one; I then yelled or waved or did something crazy to get the bartender’s attention, and finally got my vodka.

I sipped the vodka because I figured if I was forking out thirty shekels (about five bucks) for one measly shot, I might as well draw it out. Marina saw me sipping and exclaimed, “Ew! You’re not supposed to sip shots! You have to drink it all at once!” So I drank the remainder all at once. I don’t know. I still like sipping.

Beginning many months before the trip, Marina had maintained constant pressure on me and Irene (and anybody else misfortunate enough to be within sight) to try absinthe. Absinthe is another one of those things that’s illegal in the U.S. but not anywhere else. It’s a green drink with almost one and a half times as much alcohol as vodka, which may be the reason it’s illegal here; that or the hallucinogens it contains. Anyway, Marina once drank absinthe when she visited London and has been talking about it ever since. She said the bartender sprinkled sugar on top of the drink and set it on fire, and then she had to blow it out and drink the absinthe really fast while it was still hot. “It’s the most disgusting thing ever,” Marina said. “You have to try it.”

In a rare display of backbone, I determinedly resisted Marina’s attempts to persuade me into what really did not sound like a good time. After it took twelve lifetimes to get a shot of vodka, however, I realized that if I was going to spend vast sums of time and money to get miniscule quantities of drink, I should probably get something that is (1) interesting, (2) unavailable back home, and (3) high in alcohol content. To my deep dismay, absinthe fit the bill to a T and possibly also a W. Irene, who was also initially opposed to drinking the green stuff, independently traveled down similar logical lines, and we both secretly decided to order absinthe. Marina was unaware of our machinations, however, and apparently she was so desperate to make us feel sick that she promised us she’d drink absinthe, too, if we did. The four of us (Yana somehow also got sucked in) then each ordered a shot and chugged simultaneously.

Our Israeli absinthe-drinking experience was not nearly as exciting as Marina’s London counterpart, because it did not involve fire. The drink was green; that was about the pinnacle of craziness. To my inexperienced taste buds, absinthe was nothing more than a mildly licoricey vodka. Marina, on the other hand, was truly revulsed by it: after downing her shot, she promptly went outside to the patio area and gazed intently at the rocks as her brain’s desire to keep her dignity fought with her stomach’s desire to vomit. Topping off this delightful spectacle was the gradual discoloration of Marina’s face, which slowly took on the hue of the absinthe she just drank. Her heroic effort to not barf was far and away the greatest moment of the evening and possibly also the entire trip.

I wasn’t expecting to have a high tolerance for alcohol. It was late when we got to the disco and dinner had been a long time ago; also, while I like alcohol, I have never consumed it in anything approaching large quantities. Still, I’m a little disappointed that two shots (vodka + absinthe) were enough to make me tipsy. My mouth didn’t close when my brain told me to shut up, and the world didn’t stop moving when my feet told me to stand still. Nevertheless, life suddenly became marginally more enjoyable and I found myself almost appreciating the darkness and the savagely bad music. I think if I would have gulped down another shot or two I might have actually had a good time. So I didn’t drink any more alcohol for the rest of the night.

After the absinthe, Marina and Yana and I were sufficiently under the influence to willingly dance in the small, dark dance floor crowded with smelly drunken Jewish people. Marina doesn’t like dancing; I hate it; I don’t think Yana’s a big fan, either; but evidently alcohol can really screw with people. Now, I’ve seen some scary stuff in don’t-drink-and-drive videos — one in particular showed a model’s face after she flew off a highway exit and it looked like a three-dimensional puzzle of a red zombie head that had been gnawed on by rats and then improperly put together — but by far the most frightening anti-alcohol picture I have in my mind is the image of somewhat drunken Marina that night screaming “GUYS, LET’S DANCE!!!” The fact that unreasonable alcohol consumption can make an intelligent person desire dancing — the most pointless, idiotic activity ever conceived of by mankind, except for perhaps watching C-SPAN — was, to me, excessively disconcerting, and I decided that night that I didn’t ever want to get drunk.

I had one shot of absinthe and it was fun; my roommate Jeff had five shots and it wasn’t quite as enjoyable. He spent a large portion of the evening moaning and periodically puking into a plastic bag. The following day, when I asked him what exactly was the train of reasoning which had led him to conclude that drinking five shots of absinthe was a good idea, he told me he “wasn’t really feeling anything” after the fourth shot and figured he’d try a fifth. Beyond that we don’t know what happened because Jeff’s memory reel seems to have been snipped, but I imagine he had some whacked out hallucinations. The lesson I can draw from Jeff’s experience is that if you don’t feel drunk after four shots of absinthe, then it is probably a good time to put your shekels away and leave the bar; playing some soothing games of Settlers of Catan might also not be a bad idea. Then again, playing Settlers of Catan is never a bad idea.

The holiest Jewish site is the Western Wall, also called the Wailing Wall, located in Jerusalem. The wall is the last remaining part of the holy temple which the Romans destroyed around the same time everything else in Israel happened: two thousand years ago. I think the Romans kicked our asses pretty handily in that particular war, so I’m not entirely sure why they didn’t destroy the entire temple; perhaps they got three fourths of the way done and decided to take a lunch break and then forgot. Whatever the reason, the Wailing Wall’s preservation was extremely fortuitous: the Messiah got the very last building permit from the zoning commission before it was dissolved, so now the Jews aren’t allowed rebuild the temple until he comes back.

In the meantime, Jews often go to the wall to pray, cry, and leave funny messages in the cracks. Every month a rabbi takes all the slips of paper out and either buries them or burns them, depending on what the guy said; he spoke kind of fast and nobody could agree afterwards on what word he used. The rabbi probably burns them, because fire is cool. As our group explored this sacred site, the most common deep and profound topic of conversation was: do you think the rabbi reads the notes before he burns/buries them?! I think he does. A lot of them are probably really serious and boring, like, “Dear God, we are sick of all this war and fighting. Please, please bring piss to the Middle East. Much love, — Ezekiel,” or, “Dear God, I was really good this year. Can I pleeeeeeeeease have a puppy? Your the coolest!! — Davey;” but I refuse to believe there isn’t at least one person who sticks in a real silly and hilarious one every now and then like, “Whut-whut whut up G-dawg! I don’t know if you rigged evolution or not, but if you did, I think you should have stopped it after monkeys. — You’re pal, Bobalicious.” I was thinking of writing an amusing note myself, but then I figured there was no point because the rabbi might not read mine (since it’d be in English) and god doesn’t exist, so there wouldn’t be anyone to laugh at my monumental wit.

I forgot to mention this before, but the Western Wall is actually such an amazingly holy place that we went there twice. One was on I think the third day of the trip, and the second time was on the last day, which coincided with a major Jewish holiday, and which therefore meant — according to a string of intensely complicated but nevertheless highly accurate logic which you’re just going to have to take my word on — that we absolutely had to go at four o’clock in the morning. Yana, Marina, and Irene were pathetic, lazy pansies, so they slept in and skipped the second visit. They were the only ones. They ought to die. Anyway, on the second visit, the place was absolutely packed: on the first day, I went up to the wall and touched it, so that I could later say I went up to the wall and touched it; but on the second visit, I got to within maybe fifty feet of the wall before I was completely blocked off by the heaving mass of bearded Jewish men wearing suits and black hats.

The atmosphere was so charged with fervor and religious passion that even I began to feel it. Notwithstanding my firm conviction in god’s lack of existence, I decided it was very important to write a note (a serious one) and stick it in the wall. In my shorts, sandals, and crusty t-shirt, however, I felt pitifully ridiculous forcibly squeezing past the mob of suited, singing, swaying Jewish men, so I eventually stuck the note back in my pocket and walked away. I guess my succumbing to the intimidation of the religious Jew crowd means I didn’t really believe what I wrote on the note. It stayed in my pocket for a couple of days before I finally threw it away in a trashcan in the New York airport.

.: posted by Boris 1:50 AM

Sunday, January 02, 2005

Online Wisdom: Part the Sixth

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so I figured I’d better repeat the stuff I know I probably said in previous introductions. I keep a text file on my desktop into which I paste stupid things people say to me online. When the file gets big, I dump it into a blog entry and add some lame comments. For your convenience, I edit out most of the typos and irrelevant bits; however, I promise not to do anything obnoxious. For instance, I would never replace

fly197: i am everyone in my family's bitch

with

fly197: I am a heinous bitch

even though the change would make the statement considerably more accurate. With that: enjoy!

***

slila22: survival of the grossest
slila22: ugly fish have survived because they're ugly enough to blend into rocks
ChessMen15: I know, but it doesn't seem fair
ChessMen15: I'd like for the prettiest things to survive
slila22: bor, we'd both be dead.

fly197: I am everyone in my family's bitch

yb25: I think you are too cynical
yb25: it’s probably bad for your health

(Meet Jim, my charming and social suitemate)
jameshengenius: again, I cant really talk. I just got back from the bookstore with a text on Babylonian mythology.

(Here is how everyone wished me a happy birthday)
cBearFunk: lets go with jeffs idea for a euchre club this week at your house
fronomo530: well, looks like we're having a birthday Euchre Club at your house this week, woo!
jameshengenius: Eh, happy birthday?
ragingraptorm2: happy birthday
rmartyshaw: happy bday
S10penguin: really??
S10penguin: happy birthday!
slila22: happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear boris, happy birthday to you. happy 19th!
ThanatosK: Happy Birthday Boris!!!
Thumper 00056: you're old
Thumper 00056: no wait, that's me
yb25: Happy Birthday Boris!
(No two people’s wishes were the same! Yana’s and Billy’s differed by a mere two exclamation marks, though.)

slila22: I don't think pissing people off is hilarious
slila22: I think you having a sex drive is hilarious

fly197: I haven't been in Linux these past few days
fly197: finally returned to it
fly197: (we missed each other)
(Marina’s unhealthy obsession with her computer makes me feel much better about mine)

(Wish I knew the context…)
fronomo530: oh well, hey, you wanna go out and have gay sex?

slila22: anyway bor.
slila22: shut the fuck up!
ChessMen15: ah, I was waiting for that
slila22: why???!?!!!
slila22: why didn't you just do it!
slila22: goddamnit!

fly197: I suck at life
(Truest thing Marina ever said.)

ChessMen15: crap, however, is bad
fly197: it is not!
fly197: it is wonderful

(Life advice from Lila)
slila22 (1:18:12 PM): don't have kids
slila22 (1:18:13 PM): ever

(Lila telling me what my wife will be like)
slila22 (1:21:47 PM): no, she'd have to be crazy to marry you, not stupid. She'd be stupid to bear your children

ChessMen15: it doesn't quite work
slila22: that's upsetting
ChessMen15: well, unless you physically beat me
slila22: I could do that
ChessMen15: I would ask that you didn't
slila22: damnit
ChessMen15: a little violent, are we?
slila22: kidding
ChessMen15: dang
ChessMen15: I keep missing it when you joke
slila22: hm, good bor
ChessMen15: I blame it on the fact that sarcasm doesn't carry well over IM
slila22: I blame it on your idiocy

ChessMen15: you enjoy hurting my feelings
fly197: true.

(This will never, ever happen again)
fly197: yeah, I see
fly197: you're right

jameshengenius: or we could go canoeing!
jameshengenius: which I've have a strange hankering for recently
[…]
jameshengenius: I always liked using my oars to dump nearby canoes into the water and watching the screaming passengers be swept downstream.
(So I guess that explains the hankering)

fly197: you make Lila sound like she only ever says hateful things to you.
(Which is different from the truth how?)

ChessMen15: not a brilliant comment
fly197: exactly
fly197: well, its you
fly197: is brilliance possible, never mind expected?

slila22: who?
slila22: me and Marina?
ChessMen15: yeah
slila22: since when do we count as people?

(Excellent Rebuttal Tactics 101, by Professor Schwartz)
slila22: whateverever loserface

TheaVoluptas: brb
ChessMen15: k
TheaVoluptas: back
ChessMen15: welcome back, mate
TheaVoluptas: I'm not your mate, and if I am I must be a very unsuccessful one since we don't have any children.
(Way to kill my Australian mood, loserface)

ChessMen15: besides, Marina's not SO terrible
slila22: m...
slila22: debatable
(Truest thing Lila ever said.)

TheaVoluptas: Yo, Boristina, what up?
TheaVoluptas: :-)
TheaVoluptas: lol, forgive me
TheaVoluptas: Couldn't resist
TheaVoluptas: I swear
(I was there. I was just coldly, coldly ignoring her.)

(Valuable clarifications)
BadHair17: anyways, I'm off to pee and then eat
BadHair17: but not eat my pee

IHateAIM410: hi this is kate,, daves sister!
IHateAIM410: dave said i could leave you a message
IHateAIM410: i'm cooler than he is
IHateAIM410: bye
(Your syntax sure is a lot worse, though)

Thumper 00056: 2+2=4 unless it doesn't

fly197: you have threesomes with me and Lila all the time
fly197: its never been that exciting

(Julie is bipolar)
snobuny4ever: HAHA you started school already!!!
snobuny4ever: MUAHAHA
snobuny4ever: I’m sad I missed you.

TheaVoluptas: I'm bored.
TheaVoluptas: Come and play with me.
TheaVoluptas: I'm having an acne breakout like nobody's business. Luckily they can't really be seen yet.
TheaVoluptas: It's funny that acme is so similar to acne
(The things she says when I’m not around…)

Auto response from BadHair17: Fuck you all!! Oh wait... I mean my computer... fuck my computer... ah what the hell, fuck y'all too

ChessMen15: so, what's on your mind?
TheaVoluptas: Boys boys boys
TheaVoluptas: What else? :-)

(Kids, this is what you SHOULDN’T be doing in college)
Auto response from bthop23: lots of hw, work, and responsibilities........nothing a few minutes with my good friend Jack Daniels won't cure

ChessMen15: how are things with you?
fly197: alright
fly197: programming
fly197: Friday night activity of Marina

Mandy: Good. And you should mention, "Unless truly forced to, I will never write about another Mandy that is not my dear wonderful friend Mandy Kessler. Because next to her, all other Mandys pale."
Mandy: Something along those lines. :-D
ChessMen15: um...
ChessMen15: a wee bit harsh, wouldn't you say?
Mandy: Oh no, I mean, certainly it doesn't praise me as much as I should be praised, but it doesn't really make me sound bad or anything. :-P
Mandy: O:-)
(Ego problem?)

yb25: but yeah I think I liked it more when your away message was up because then I did not AIM you, and waste away my life online
(Talking to me a is a waste of life? Thanks.)

(stolen from Marina’s away message)
Lila: it'll all work out. I know. I just don't have enough lube yet.
Lila: I'll purchase some tomorrow.

Mandy: Ahhh!!! A booger just fell out of my nose!!!!!!!!!

Mandy: My eye is twitching

(stolen from Marina’s away message; only CS majors will understand the hilarity)
(22:26:13) joe: well
(22:26:15) joe: it does terminate
(22:26:20) joe: but only after the stack overflows

Auto response from Lila: fuck it dude, let's go bowling.

(You are about to witness the proudest moment of Ben’s life)
ChessMen15: and seeing Dodgeball again was reasonably entertaining, although the best part of that movie by far is the fact that Kevin was "inspired" to play foursquare
Ben H: ha
ChessMen15: after watching it, he made Jim get his parents to by a playground ball
ChessMen15: and we actually went outside and played foursquare a couple of times
ChessMen15: it was fun, although you have to let your dignity fall a few notches
Ben H: ok holdon
ChessMen15: okay
Ben H: I have to savor this moment because it will never happen again.................
Ben H: “buy”...............not “by”..........in context from the sentence above

Dan: giant red sore on your lip?
Dan: ew...
Dan: herpes!
Dan: ;-)

(Politically-minded people’s away messages scare me)
Auto response from Ben H: I Hate Ralph Nadar and I want to kill him just to watch him die!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

fly197: * Siren changes topic to 'Is it considered oral sex if my pc goes down on me???'

S10penguin: do you have a car up there?
ChessMen15: alas, no
ChessMen15: too lazy to figure out how to get a permit
ChessMen15: also, I didn't want all my suitemates constantly bugging me for rides -- none of them have a car
S10penguin: ah okay, lol, but that might be fun, you guys could go out on the town on the weekends (not that you guys don't do that already)
(Ouch. The bitter, scathing sarcasm has gone highly unappreciated.)

TheaVoluptas: brb, in desperate need of deodorant

ChessMen15: you stare at the keyboard when you type, though, don't you?
ChessMen15: that's gotta be annoying
TheaVoluptas: lol, I don't always need to.
TheaVoluptas: There, I didn't look at that.
TheaVoluptas: Or htat.
TheaVoluptas: :-P
TheaVoluptas: Or that.
TheaVoluptas: Here, I wont look at the keyboard for the rest of the time.
ChessMen15: ouch! I am smacked down
TheaVoluptas: No lookey.
TheaVoluptas: No lookey.
ChessMen15: amazing
ChessMen15: truly, I am awed
TheaVoluptas: Oh be friggin quiet. :-P

fly197: algorithm, n.: Trendy dance for hip programmers.
(Goodness, this entry seems to be riddled with dumb CS jokes.)

TheaVoluptas: How many people do you think just sit around their room naked?
(Well, one for sure…)

(From Mandy’s profile)
"Now Mandy, do I need to rewind this DVD before I can play it again?" -Mrs. Yoder
"Okay, time to take notes."
"But there's a paperclip on my desk!!"-Gabrielle

bthop23: in place of future conversations on the merits or either political party let us just watch the news every night and the legislation that passes in both houses of Congress and let us just sit back and watch as our once great and promising nation goes from quintessential, successful democracy to Neo-Theocracy in which religious law and denominational prejudices rule
bthop23: In short, our country is going to shit and we're all going to die
(Damn pessimistic liberals)

Auto response from slila22: shower time. It's like hammer time, but without pants.

Auto response from AdamHorton1: OMFG... that was too close. I had a freaking heart attack...
They almost voted Ami off Survivor tonight... she got 4 votes!!! They better not scare me like that again.
Homework. Leave me a message.
(Oh, how Adam has fallen since college began)

Auto response from TheaVoluptas: Man, wearing only one sock feels weird. And when wearing only one sock feels weird, we all know that means that it's time for bed.
(Logic has never been Mandy’s strong suit)

fly197 (3:38:05 PM): write me a fucking email
fly197 (3:38:07 PM): you worthless piece of shit
(Can you believe I wrote that wench a letter after this shameless display of rude language?)

Auto response from slila22: my dad went to a Bob Dylan concert last night. I made an excel chart of Latin vocab. My dad's cooler than I am.
(So true.)

Auto response from TheaVoluptas: Sitting on chap stick all day kind of makes your butt hurt.

ChessMen15: so how's life?
slila22: tough
slila22: I should get a helmet

Auto response from ChessMen15: Being a worthless slab of rotting flesh.
fly197: oooh worthless rotting flesh.
fly197: sexy

(Why girls are evil, terrible people)
fly197: I need to get on that! I haven't yet explored all the excellent uses of boyfriend that there are

Energetic56: kangaroos have pockets

(It’s good to know your friends are always there when you need them most)
ChessMen15: Mandy, I have a question for you
TheaVoluptas signed off at 12:22:19 AM.

ChessMen15: how long do I have to think about it?
fly197: 0 days

fly197: its ok, girls are worthless
ChessMen15: girls are worthless...guys are worthless...what's that leave?
ChessMen15: sheep?
fly197: jill.
ChessMen15: jill...?
fly197: look at your right hand, palm down

ChessMen15: bye Marina
fly197: f u!
(Evidently she did not enjoy the conversation quite as much as I did)

Auto response from slila22: "it's called the genetic lottery, and you lost." ~my dad
(It’s okay, Lila. I think we all lost.)

Auto response from slila22: WASTE OF CARBON.
ChessMen15: that's an angry-sounding away message there
slila22: only slightly and only because I promised myself I wouldn't go on line for the next week about oh, 8 hours ago

Thumper 00056: why do you hate yourself for being on facebook? is it because everybody who's on there is obsessed with showing off how many pretend friends they have? is it because they're all shallow and annoying? is it because cats always land on their feet?
(Mmm…yes.)

ChessMen15: evening, Marina
fly197: shut up

ChessMen15: doesn't it kind of bother you, though?
ChessMen15: that you're driven not by a passion for learning, but by cold greed?
AdamHorton1: yeah
AdamHorton1: it eats me up from inside
AdamHorton1: but oh well

(Classic away message, compliments of Ashley)
Auto response from Energetic56: Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream...
Haha! Fooled you!
I'm a submarine!

ChessMen15: could you attach the story to your next email?
ChessMen15: that way, I can put my name on it and publish it
yb25: sure
(Look before you type!)

yb25: you’re too innocent
ChessMen15: just in that one respect
yb25: oh yeah I forgot how worldly and experienced you are in other areas of life
(THANK YOU for the sarcasm, everyone. You can stop it now.)

BookFishy: My shirt smells like someone else. :-
ChessMen15: you're a bad person
ChessMen15: :-)
BookFishy: lol
BookFishy: Yes, but a horny bad person.

slila22: a sandwich, bowl of cereal, and clementines is healthy
ChessMen15: that is not a serious dinner
slila22: it's just disorganized
ChessMen15: that's like a light brunch
slila22: it's a lot of food. I'm going to kill you. I don't even know what I'm doing for dinner. Just stop being annoying.
slila22: it's my job
ChessMen15: being annoying?
slila22: yes
(I think she was crying. What do you think?)

BookFishy: Anne says you're allowed to lust after her
(Thanks, I think I’ll pass.)

BookFishy: (I just now realized that I'm sitting on a wet towel. What a dolt I am) How are they?
(Probably not very comfortable?)

NerdamI2k: and he's got an entire box full of DnD, WH40k books under his bed
NerdamI2k: I've never felt so out nerded

(With this perceptive insight, Yana joins Lila in the ranks of Online Wisdom gurus)
yb25: I'm not extravagant with money but I would rather have one nice thing than like 100 crappy things
yb25: my mother calls it smart
yb25: I don't know if it so
yb25: because I think “smart” would be like one crappy thing

yb25: ok I see what you’re saying
yb25: but I don't care
(I seem to get this sort of thing a lot)

yb25: I am starting to think about why I suffer
yb25: but I don't really suffer
yb25: I just need to get back to the ghetto to get my act together
(You must understand the irony of this coming from a chemical engineering major at Johns Hopkins)

And now, to finish off this bi-annual installment, we end with a couple quintessential quotes quite atrociously ripped out of context:

Mandy: I got it off, don't worry. Mmm, it was yummy.

ChessMen15: if I do it now, it'll be quite short
Mandy: Oh well, I want it now!

***

Thanks for reading, and see you in a couple of months!