A day of solemn reflection

In which your humble narrator pledges undying devotion to a certain corporation.

Happy birthday, Gmail. You are five years old today.

Also, if this works for physical storage, I propose that Google provide cloud daycare. I'd just upload the children to a nice, progressive, cloud-based daycare center when I had to go to work, and then download them again at the end of the day.

If they come back with a few banner ads on their butts, well... I'm probably cool with that.

Take that, hoop.

In which your humble narrator passes his preliminary exam and becomes a doctoral candidate.

After much fretting I sat for my oral preliminary examination this morning. Much to my delight, the questions were less "What business do you think you have here, miscreant, (probably retarded) urchin boy?" and more "So what do you think about this thing that you actually know about?"

Now on to other things. No, not a dissertation, gentle reader, the procurement of Kentucky Bourbon.

Wearisome Week

In which your humble narrator stares down the gaping maw of a test with no parameters and the beginning of another lousy semester.

Today is the first day of a new term, bringing with it new classes to teach, fresh undergraduate faces, an impending preliminary exam for my doctoral degree and a big old-fashioned bucket of glum. The enterprise of completing a Ph.D. seems less and less appealing since it seems apparent that it will result, not in a wood-paneled faculty office complete with tweed jacket and pipe, but rather a somewhat less glamorous job in the food service industry. "Would you like a thesis on the application of psycholinguistic research to reading comprehension tests with your burger and fries, sir? No?"

At least I'll be Dr. Impoverished Unemployed Person, Ph.D.

Friday brings with it my preliminary oral examination in which I will go into a room with my committee, give a 20 minute presentation and then hope and pray that I have actually learned something in my (too long) graduate career. I scheduled in for 9:30 in the morning, thinking that at least there won't be much of the day preceding the exam to spend agonizing over my impending doom. The lack of any set expectations for this exam is what sends my anxiety into full-on catastrophic mode: "What's that, simple boy? You're not ready for the physical challenge in which you wrestle with Jean Piaget's reanimated corpse?"

This may be the last post until after Friday as I plan to spend the next 60+ hours pulling the hair from my head strand by strand.

Of Deviled Eggs, Bad Science and the Psychology of Stupidity

In which your humble narrator makes a mistake.

First, I confess. I read the Huffington Post. A college friend of mine used to work for her Greekness, and I've read it for years. I rationalize it by claiming that it's just like the New York Post, but for urban, liberal types.

Last night I made the mistake of clicking on the "Living" tab on Huffington Post. For the love of God, if you enjoy food, don't feel particularly like mediatating, doing yoga or actualizing your dream states, don't visit. All food is viewed through the prism of it's effects on your health. The headline article today is "GLUTEN: What you don't know might KILL you." This article takes a surprisingly individual tack toward self-diagnosis. First, the author tells you to cut all gluten from your diet, then reintroduce it. If you feel bad at all after reintroduction you should never eat gluten again. And this guy is an M.D. Really? A single trial test? Shouldn't doctors have some familiarity with, oh... I don't know, SCIENCE?

I think that the vast majority of these articles are really about two complementary psychological desires. The first is to find an explanation for your illness/addiction/fatness/compulsive sexual behavior with Peruvian mountain goats that relieves you of any responsibility at all. That goat was asking for it. And the second desire is to individuate oneself from all the other wealthy boutique liberals so you can be unique like everyone else. For additional examples of these two complementary psychological drives please see: Oprah, Dr. Phil, daytime medical television and the entire self-help industrial complex. I'm pretty resigned to most of this silliness, but please, leave food out of it.

To help us move past this idiocy, here's a nice picture of some deviled eggs from one of my Mom's family reunions a couple of years ago. They're a pain in the butt to prepare. They're not good for you. You should still eat them and enjoy them. I do.

Winterize this!

In which your humble narrator tries to act like a local-born Minnesota person and muses freely on the topic of the weather. 

Now that I'm slowly emerging from the fog of Pie Day, Thanksgiving and Pie for Breakfast Day I can begin to fret about all the stuff that needs to be done to get ready for winter. Usually, this being Minnesota, Land of Frozen Tundra and passive-aggressive Scandinavians, we're all set for winter by Thanksgiving because November is a winter month (and so is April most of the time). Fortunately it's a well established fact that cold weather is highly correlated with moral fiber and excellent character. This is why the upper Midwest is awesome and Florida is a hell hole of moral weakness and general turpitude.

But this year, despite the weird rash of accumulating snow in October, it's been unseasonably warm, leading to all sorts of licentiousness, gluttony and sloth the likes of which we rarely see in the frigid north. So I haven't got the insulation I bought stuffed into the appropriate crevices in the attic, nor have I put cling film on the upstairs windows. We were all excited when we bought our house because it had replacement windows. Then we moved in. And now we know that we have the absolute worst replacement windows in the history of windowdom. They are shite. Especially because the cheap bastards that put them in cut costs by only putting single-pane windows in upstairs... which has only one heat vent... strategically located in the bathroom... in the shower. I like a cold bedroom, so it's not too big of a deal most of the time. However, I hate having to wipe the windows off every day after we shower (no exhaust vent either). So I've got to do the window film thing upstairs which means that I have to find the hair dryer that a friend of ours left at our old condo two years ago.

Also I still haven't raked the leaves in the back yard. They came off of the neighbor's tree so I'm afraid it might be socialistic if I raked them for him. Glenn Beck's website doesn't seem to offer any guidance on the issue.

So I've got a ton of crap to do all of which I'll start as soon as I get my butt off the couch. I predict that will occur sometime tomorrow.

Yes you can! (But you shouldn't!)

In which your humble narrator discusses ideas that are not-so-good.

Exhibit A: d'Armond Speers - A linguist (good! We love linguists because your humble narrator is one... sort of.) who decided it would be a super-fun experiment to only speak Klingon (!) to his infant son until he was 3. Because, really, who doesn't want to use their children as free experimental subjects?

It think this falls into the category of "Things you can do, but shouldn't." Things like:

• Speak only Klingon to your infant child
• Decide to never cut your fingernails again
• Buy a house that you cannot afford
• Accept free drinks from a guy with an eye-patch named "Slash"
  
• Vote Republican
• Eat at Arby's
• Ask Amy Winehouse to baby-sit your children
  

Good old Teddy Roosevelt said, "Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive." I don't know the translation into Klingon.

I married a sex researcher

In which your humble narrator comments on his Wife's profession and a book he recently managed to finish reading.

It's an absolute delight to tell people that you're married to a sex researcher. It's even better if you're telling local, born 'n' bred Minnesotans. Their little eyes get big and narrow quickly. Then they pronounce it "interesting," which is Minnesota-Speak for either "that is so boring that I will probably die right now" or "that is too horrifying to even contemplate; I have no choice but to go into a coma."

Wife wasn't a sex researcher when I married her, but that's what she does now. It's actually much, much, much more boring than you think it is. She mostly does fancy (and sexy) math and writes statistical program syntax and consults on research methodology for the faculty in her department.

If you know the history of sex research (or as I prefer: sexy research) you know that it all started with Alfred Kinsey, a voyeuristic, scientific, hedonistic, occasionally masochistic researcher at Indiana University who collected a lot of super-smutty data from a lot of perverted people. He was also one of two main characters in T.C. Boyle's The Inner Circle, a fictionalized account of Kinsey's sexy research as told by a fictional assistant, John Milk. Boyle's portrait of Kinsey isn't particularly flattering. He is presented largely as a somewhat cold, compulsive man whose control over those who surrounded him extended even into the bedroom. All in all, Liam Neeson seemed a lot nicer in the movie.

What was striking about this book was the listlessness of the novel. Boyle usually creates characters, that even if you don't particularly like, are at least interesting. In this volume he took a man who was arguably one of the more interesting scientists of the twentieth century and makes him into a stern, creepy controlling father figure for a bleating little weiner-man narrator.

Somehow I thought the book would be a lot more salacious. But then again I thought being married to a sex researcher would be too.