Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
My wife and I went to a baseball game with our nephews.  As is my custom, I didn’t stand during the National Anthem.  My sister-in-law noticed it, and when I stepped away she said something to my wife, my wife said something to me, and in the interests of domestic tranquility I stood for [...]

By Thoreau
B Psycho is having problems with increasingly sophisticated comment spam. To learn more, click on this link! I think we are close to the fulfillment of this excellent xkcd.

Most Easter songs are worse than most Christmas songs. The solution is obvious.
Harke the Herald Angels sing
Don’t be sad about that thing
Though it was two days ago
He is not still dead you know
Jesus Christ can not be killed
This is not like the Big Chill
Hark the Herald Angels sing!
Don’t be sad about that thing!
And this is [...]

Netflix has the Ian Dury Biopic, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, on instant streaming, so I watched it last night. I liked it better than I expected to, based on the mixed reviews. Andy Serkis plays the adult Dury, and manages a few interesting harmonics off a pretty familiar melody: the biopic rockstar’s [...]

By Thoreau
I don’t much like the media and I hate the House of Bush. But I don’t recall the wedding of Jenna Bush getting the same hoopla as the upcoming royal wedding. Strangely enough, the Clinton wedding got more attention.

By Thoreau
I’m teaching an advanced class to a bunch of students who failed it last quarter and are retaking it.  I was also their instructor last quarter, when they failed it.  Because of the sequence in which courses and prereqs are offered, there are no new students in the class, just people who took it [...]

By Thoreau
According to a new poll, 47% of Republicans think Obama was born in another country and 22% aren’t sure. I cut some slack to some of the 22% who aren’t sure—if you aren’t following this story closely but you hear that there’s some sort of controversy, I guess that “not sure” is a [...]

By Thoreau
Nature is publishing heresy.  Too many PhDs?  Nonsense!  Every funding agency and professional society assures me that we need to feed more students into the PhD pipeline to help develop the workforce.  Hence we are sending a B- student to a well-funded and well-photographed summer program to encourage more students to pursue graduate study [...]

By Thoreau
My university is insisting that I use Office 2010 on my new laptop, even though Office 2003 worked just fine.  Word and Powerpoint keep crashing, so I’ve moved over to Open Office.  Yes, I could probably try to find a way to fix Office 2010, but I’m spiteful.  Anyway, the one big drawback to [...]

By Thoreau
I had no idea that Patti Ann Browne was funny.