Hot Quiz on Quiz Action

Alrighty - Photos are done and trashcan fried rice has been eaten, so now back to work here!

Nearly half a moon ago, I taunted you with a puzzling puzzle or quirky quiz, and you all did well - however, there were gaps. :)

4 - Revenge by the Eurthmics! Oh, hang your heads in shame!
5 - Chiquitita by ABBA. Oh, you can be happy you didn't get that one.
8 - Right Here Waiting For You by Bryan Adams. I'm not sure how to feel about that one.

But the past is the past! Here we move into the [reverb and echo] FUTURE! [/reverb and echo]

1.

Am I hard enough
Am I rough enough
Am I rich enough
I'm not too blind to see

2.

If I listen close I can hear them singers
Voices in your body coming through on the radio

3.

She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh
I told her I didn't and crawled off to sleep in the bath

4.

Me and you and you and me
No matter how they toss the dice, it has to be
The only one for me is you, and you for me

5.

If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?
For I must be traveling on, now,
'Cause there's too many places I've got to see

6.

I spot a little thing and I followed her all night
In a funky pair of levis and her sweater's kind of tight
She had a west coast strut that was as sweet as molases

7.

The place is a madhouse, feels like being cloned
My beacon's been moved under moon and star
Where am I to go, now that I've gone too far
Soon you will come to know when the bullet hits the bone

8.

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room
Safe within my womb
I touch no-one and no-one touches me

9.

Time can bring you down,
Time can bend your knees.
Time can break your heart,
Have you begging please, begging please.

10.

never knew there'd come a day
When I'd be sayin' to you
"Don't let this good love slip away
Now that we know that it's true."

We Need To Talk...

Now, I know in the past I've said that I love you. I guess, I would have to admit that I still do, but I really think that our relationship is going in a new direction, and I'm not comfortable with it. I know that it may seem that I am dependent on you and the... things that you do for me, but I never claimed that I would be exclusive to you. And let's be honest, we both know that you have many others.

I guess I should just say it. I really don't want you calling my honey. It kinda freaks me out.

In A World...

This post is built off of a comment over at Ianqui's wherein she suggested that there should be a

TV show called "Ph.D, The Series". The students were going to be in the fictional field of Mathematical Forestry. There was going to be all manner of hijinks and drama. Sabotaged experiments. Sticky TA-undergrad romances. Imperious liberal elite professors. You know how it is.

I've always loved the idea of a PhD TV show. I've put way too much thought into it, too. It's perfect! Here's my cast breakdown:

You could get rotating hot young things cast to play the undergrads (think pop star de jour). This would be great to draw in the younger audiences. Maybe the next Backstreet Boy comes out of the closet to his gruff and closeted English Comp prof in a paper. Maybe tomorrow's Britney gets caught plagiarizing her World History final and shows up in tears at her prof's office hours.

Grad students could be another great source of drama - think drugs, sex and rock and roll (all the drudgework can be shown in CSI-style montages - rotating camera angles over TAs hunched over massive tomes with hard-pounding music playing over it all). The bad-boy slacker who has a savant-like ability with obscure formulas or Latin or something (done before, but it's a rich vein - it'll hold). The deeply troubled and troubling rising star character actors could be your source for actors. Maybe throw in a lost idealist in there too. Fewer pretty folks, but more troubled - it balances out. This would also be a great source for farewell episodes. We get to know the grad students and then they leave in a couple of years. That's drama.

The key would be the profs though. Bardiac's (one of the commenters over at Ianqui's) right - The Lilith-From-Cheers sexy Shakespeare specialist would be perfect. She/he gets all the smitten undergrads to take her/his class and they struggle and actually learn! She/He is brilliant and frustrated that all anyone wants to do is oggle. This is very marketable. You get a beautiful actor and you get to deal with image and gender issues too! And she/he is an alcoholic.

Let's see...

Then there's the comic relief clueless chair who screws everything up.

You'd also need more second-tier pretty but backstabbing folks, too.

Your main love interest couple would be a prof with a trailing spouse going through marital and career troubles while trying to settle in at the new campus. They'd be in separate departments so the plots don't get to heavy in one specialization, but you get good crossover in the characters. You'd have to specify the departments though, and they'd have to be fairly mainstream, but with very technical upper echelons. I'd say maybe English and Chemistry. Everyone can approach both subjects on a basic level, but you could show the incomprehensibility of the elite levels of each - and as a bonus, if the series goes downhill, the entire campus could be wiped out in a chemical explosion brought on by a spurned TA. Or a umm... Wordsworth virus? hmmm... That needs work. English department folks need to be more dangerous.

Finally, there's the dottering old emeritus who actually knows and understands everything secretly keeps everything from falling apart. He'll show up every now and then and dispense wisdom and yoda-like confusing sayings that prove true only in sad tear-stained hindsight.

It's perfect I tells ya!

Hollywood! Give me a call!

(Last post of the night - I promise)

Your Friendly Neighborhood Curmudgeon

Kids these days, I tell ya...

• Item #1: From a shirt on a mere slip of a girl weighted down with half her body weight in mascara: You want me - you just don't know it yet.
• Um, yeah, I am very much not aware of wanting you. This is true.
• Item the Second: Now, I know very well that there are many reasons for wearing a monstrously huge parka, mittens and what looked like Wookie chaps (those would be chaps made from the hide and fur of a Wookie). For instance, it may be cold somewhere where you happen to be. I can say, however, that if the temperature wavers around the mid-70s, then you do not need the parka. If you feel you do, then head down to the clinic, because your body isn't working. Also, your parka is ugly.
• Item 3 in a series of 3: You know that old saying about everything being funnier with monkeys? It's very true. Oh, so true. I shall submit further possible rules.
  
• Other things that make stories funnier:
  
• Being somewhere where you don't understand other people and they don't understand you.
• The Russian Mafia
• alcohol
  
• falling down stairs (related to previous bullet point)
• Pumas (see Smothers' Brothers)
• All of these things rolled up in one story told by a man with a great accent
• Things that make a story less funny
• Being somewhere where you don't understand other people and they don't understand you.
• The Russian Mafia
• Alcoholism
• Falling down stairs (related to previous bullet point or not)
• Pumas (The shoes. They just aren't funny.)
• The more recent movie remake of King Kong

As far as I'm concerned, I may be better off making item three into my dissertation.

Monkeys. Hehehe

P.S. I hope I get another opportunity to tag another post 'Wookie Chaps' sometime in the future

A Lifted Pseudo-Meme!

Because I enjoyed it as Casa RV a little while ago, I'll bring you my version of:

An Activity: Draft a Response!

[Cheering!]

Info needed to craft a response to this email:

• we just finished class number nine for this session
• this is the first I heard that this guy was in my class
• This is a very technical class where every lesson builds critically on previous lessons. I can see no conceivable way even to talk about this lesson without a deep knowledge of the past nine classes.
• I came very close to splitting an infinitive in the previous bullet point. Can you guess where? Now that I look at it again, I hope you can.
  

From: 987452348756@0934785.com
To: Overread
Subject: Hey there!

Hey there! I'm G. Nius who barely hacked his way through your last class. How are things goin'? I just wanted to tell you not to drop me from this class. I haven't been to class yet because I just got back in town. Oh, and I'm not going to be in class tomorrow because I got stuck in City-Very-Much-Within-Driving-Distance. So I guess I'll make up all the quizzes when I get back?

G.

Sigh, He's actually a hard working guy and I'll try to help him out. Feh. I'm a pushover.

Enough about me! How would you answer?

I Don't Think We're in Kansas Anymore, ABBA

Well, things are just whirling around like a tornado around a drug addled gay icon. One of the most exciting things is that since I didn't take any grades last semester, I don't have a GPA, and since I don't have a GPA, I guess all the little forms are defaulting to a 0.00 GPA. Nice. That means I'm on the Important Academic Endangered Species List. Now, normally, it would be hard for me to care about that very much, except one cannot be on said list and still be a TA. Neat, eh? We'll see how this turns out. Here's hoping there's a petition of some kind.

Also, while not particularly worthy of note, my journey for lunch today was paradoxically noteworthy. There was a magical coupon that claimed to give $3 off a burger, fries and drink at a local sorta-campus place in an area of campus I had not seen yet. Now, I'm not as thrifty as I should be (more on that later), but I saw this as a challenge. Woohoo! Road Trip! Except it's on a bike. And just me. And there wasn't any singing. Well, I take that last one back. I did sing quite a bit of ABBA. Not well, but there it is.

Anyway, the trauma was that this little, umm... for lack of a better word, restaurant, was completely hidden. Not only was it deep in the bowels of the land of Scary Other Departments, but it was nearly surrounded by impassable construction barriers. Guess how many I hit before getting inside? If you guessed three, you'd be right.

On the plus side, I got my cheap burger, which wasn't so bad, fries, which were so-so, but came with a fun peppery powder, and soda, which was, as is standard for most fountain service, really crappy. On top of that, I got today's 365 photo, which was posted on the wall outside. The sign raises more questions than it answers. Truly perplexing.

Maybe I'll leave the story of my lack of thriftiness for another post. It should get here next week, anyway. :)

Bullets With Your Name On Them

Ok, well, most of my recent posts have been over at the 365 blog. No real, ya know, words lately. So. Here are some words.

• Note to self. Read all the emails from the prof whose class you are TAing immediately. One might mention that she's going to drop in to your section and observe on a upcoming Monday. So after you start class, she may just slip in to your class and make you freak out just a little bit.
  
• as a side note, the class went ok, mainly. The thing is that I have a different (very) teaching style than she does, and if I knew she was coming I probably would have prepared something a little less like my own class. So, from that point of view, it's probably for the best that I didn't know she was coming. I ended up just doing my thing. Students seem to like it.
• In the section she didn't observe, I did something really stupid. I won't say what it is, but jeeze, I've been kicking myself all day long. Grrr.
• I have a giant stack of papers to grade and I didn't look at them at all tonight.
  
• I am now grading with a green pen.
  
• I ran yesterday and didn't blog it. Here you go: 8.35mi - 1:02'46"
• Ever since I said I'm going to run the marathon coming up soonish, people have been worried about my knees. I think I got a psychosomatic knee-tweak yesterday. It feels fine now though.
  

Bush's Speech