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Thursday, May 15th, 2008
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12:09 am
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| Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
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12:37 am
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13 new episodes for Reaper!!! Praise... well, you know.
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(speak to me!)
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| Monday, May 12th, 2008
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8:16 pm
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8:04 pm
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Richard Kelly puts too much stuff into his movies. Southland Tales was ambitious/creative but bloated/ridiculous, and Donnie Darko works in spite of the mythology rather than because of it. But I'm cautiously optimistic about his next project, which is based on a Twilight Zone episode. Normally I'd say there's no way you could expand a Twilight Zone episode into a full-length movie, since Twilight Zone episodes are already one two-minute plot twist expanded into a TV episode. But, see, Richard Kelly puts too much stuff into his movies, see? Match made in heaven.
Anyway, I've known about this movie for a while, so why am I talking about it now? Because The Arcade Fire are doing the score. Neonbibletastic!
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(speak to me!)
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3:10 pm
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MonNYT - 2:57 clean
In addition to the many stressful tasks waiting in the distance (this summer I'd like to learn to drive and learn French, by mid-July I need to prepare a 45-hour number theory course and write/test a trivia game, and then there's the Seattle Projects in August, job applications in the fall, and the Mystery Hunt *breathe*) I am currently dealing with three imminent hurdles: I need to write a talk with slides (and practice it) by the end of the week, I need to learn and relearn a bunch of songs for my concert on the 27th, and I need to find roommates from June through next year.
I thought the last of these was finally solved, as a friend from the math department expressed interest in moving in next year, and she said she had a friend who needed a room for the summer. Except apparently her friend and her mother are both conservative Turks who are against men and women living together, so now she's out altogether.
Rather than explain this over e-mail, she waited to tell me in person, until after I had told a few people we were (probably) full. I would bang my head on the desk repeatedly, but I'm too busy trying to make slides.
Anybody moving to Providence? Rent's cheap.
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(9 voices cried out |speak to me!)
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| Sunday, May 11th, 2008
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2:32 pm
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SunNYT - 14:28 with one error
I solved the Sunday crossword and the German WPC qualifier this morning/afternoon on my dining room table, thinking I'd do better on both in a room with better light. Except this meant I could hear my roommates talking to each other, on the phone, et cetera, which was more distracting than lousy light would have been. I was not happy with the time above, and my German qualifier score was a 360, which would be good enough for fifth in Germany but isn't up to my personal standards. And my time management sucked, as when time ran out I had at least three unsolved puzzles into which I had put signicant amounts of time, including one I had "proved" unsolvable by skillfully miscounting the length of a line. I hope some other countries have (publicly posted) tests before the USPC, because I need the practice.
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(3 voices cried out |speak to me!)
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12:38 am
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Addenda to both topics from my last post:
1) Apparently you can get a free Mc-Fil-A Sandwich (that's what I'm going to call it from now on, unless somebody has a better pun) with purchase of drink at any McDonald's this Thursday. So if you're curious, that's a good time to check it out.
2) I love Bill Hader, and I love love love Vinnie Vedici.
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(1 voice cried out |speak to me!)
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12:24 am
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All right, brace yourself for this one.
Some of you may have noticed McDonald's advertising a new "southern-style" chicken sandwich in two forms: a breakfast sandwich on a biscuit, and a lunch/dinner sandwich on a bun with two pickles. If, like me, you foam at the mouth in worship at the feet of Chick-Fil-A, this recipe should sound familiar. But given that I've never had a chicken sandwich that tastes remotely like Chick-Fil-A's, I didn't think this would be that much different from the usual McDonald's crispy chicken sandwich. But I also didn't think that would work so well for breakfast. So today, on my way home from Boston, I bought one in the name of culinary science.
So first the negatives. The meat in the McD's sandwich is definitely lower quality than a Chick-Fil-A sandwich, there's less of it, and the edges are much less crispy. Also the bun isn't as buttered (the website calls it a buttery-tasting bun, so decide for yourself what that wording is trying to hide). Oh, and I felt a little bit sick a half hour after eating it, but I find that to be true with anything I get at McDonald's (I think it may chiefly be the fries).
Keep all that in mind to put things in perspective when I tell you that OMG THE MCDONALD'S SANDWICH TASTES ALMOST EXACTLY LIKE A CHICK-FIL-A SANDWICH. The texture is different, and it's not as filling, but in terms of seasoning and meat taste, they got it pretty much exactly right. It blew my freaking mind.
Now, if I had a McDonald's and a Chick-Fil-A in front of me, would I ever go into the former and order this sandwich? Absolutely not, as the original is decidedly better. However, the imitation is decidedly better than nothing, which is what Rhode Island and Boston/Cambridge currently have when it comes to Chick-Fil-A. So I am ridiculously psyched that I can get something that tastes like Chick-Fil-A every time I pass through South Station.
As I write this, Bill Hader and Fred Armisen are on Weekend Update as two residents of Liberty City. The jokes were funny, but the physical comedy was HYSTERICAL.
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(10 voices cried out |speak to me!)
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| Saturday, May 10th, 2008
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5:22 pm
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SatNYT - 11:52 clean
I had more trouble with this than the rest of the blogosphere, finding one corner tough to work into (the one Rex started with). Of course, I was on the bus to Boston, which is not an ideal solving setting, and I was also a tad frazzled, because I had just confronted a gentleman behind me who was talking on his cell phone very loudly in a foreign language. (The foreign language didn't bother me, the loudness did). The driver made the "keep cell phone conversations brief and private" part of his spiel extra-loud... no effect. Then after a few minutes, he sternly repeated the cell phone part, and when that didn't work, I turned around and said, "Excuse me, sir, did you hear the announcement?" He mumbled something about, "You can go sit somewhere else if you want," (crowded bus, by the way) but then other people started looking straight at him, and he lowered his voice and finished up the call.
I can't stand when people think rules don't apply to them. I also both crave and abhor confrontation; I found getting through to the guy very satisfying, but then afterwards I felt bad about making him feel uncomfortable. Well, not bad, because I know I was warranted. Just sort of awkward.
Concert last night at Meehan... Amanda Palmer fell short of my expectations, but Death Cab exceeded them, which worked out well overall. A lot of Amanda's new solo material is a little bit repetitive with just piano; she mentioned there's a lot more production and instruments on the studio tracks, so I look forward to hearing those. I thought "Astronaut" was by far her best new track, so she opened solid, but overall, there were a lot of slow meandering numbers and obscure covers that didn't seem appropriate for an opening slot, where the crowd was mostly unfamiliar with her (and in the case of a few assholes next to us, openly hostile). All in all, I missed Brian.
Death Cab For Cutie, on the other hand, were really solid live. There weren't a lot of antics or banter, but the set held together based on well-constructed, well-performed guitar-driven songs, with personal highlights including "I Will Possess Your Heart," "Title And Registration," "Crooked Teeth," and a world-exploding finale of "Transatlanticism" (which you can hear me cover on guitar at a link I'm too lazy to go find, but it's on my Facebook profile). And a majority of the songs identified as new were excellent (especially "The Remainder"), so I'm psyched about picking up the new album on Tuesday. Great show, with a surprisingly lengthy six-song(!) encore.
Now I'm in Boston to eat a burrito, see PiP, and vamoose. Starting tomorrow I need to put a lot more mental energy into my talk, which should be easier now that my housing situation for next year is starting to work itself out.
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(speak to me!)
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| Friday, May 9th, 2008
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4:18 pm
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FriNYT - 10:26 clean
Not Jim's worst effort (there were a few nice clues and entries), but nothing that's going to turn me into a fan. Quite a few clues that seemed like poor choices.
Death Cab! Amanda!
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(2 voices cried out |speak to me!)
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2:10 pm
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8:42 am
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ThuNYT - 4:53 clean
Video game movie deals don't tend to excite me for a number of reasons; I'm not that into video games, for one thing, and for another they tend to either result in either projects that decay in development hell, or simply trash directed by Uwe Boll.
So a theoretical BioShock movie doesn't immediately fill me with hope, despite the fact that the game was the best I've ever played, with by far the best storyline. On the other hand, a BioShock movie directed by Gore Verbinski? Okay, you might have something there.
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(speak to me!)
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| Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
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1:43 pm
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WedNYT - 3:56 clean
Two math-related tasks lie immediately ahead of me. The first is to assemble my talk for the CANT conference in two weeks. I actually have, for all intents and purposes, only a week and a half to do this, at least the computer-intensive part; next Saturday I fly out to DC for the Post Hunt, I get back Monday night, and then the next day I head for New York. This is my first talk outside Brown's Graduate Student Seminar, and also my first talk where I'm trying to use slides, which means in addition to organizing the talk, I need to make those slides, which includes learning to use Beamer. (Awkwardly, I still don't know whether the talk is going to be an hour or half-hour long, but I'm currently planning for the latter.) Incidentally, if anybody recommends a different slide-making program, feel free to chime in. It should be able to incorporate TeX and images (EPS files at the very least).
The second task is to try to convert an algorithm I wrote in a bar last night into Mathematica code. (On a related note, I find writing anything in a bar with a pint in front of me is slightly more romantic than writing it otherwise. I have applied this theory to songwriting, playwriting, and mathematics, with mixed results in terms of quality produced.) I've been pursuing one of my conjectures by proving it for low values on n, where each proof is essentially solving an abstract logic puzzle, since certain steps depend cumulatively on what you've already shown. The haphazard nature makes it difficult to generalize for all n, but I'd like to have some more results to announce in my talk, so I've created a brute-force try-everything algorithm that should be able to do almost anything I can do by hand, just in a less intelligent fashion. Of course, turning the algorithm into code is (for me) light years from trivial. But I've gotten decent with Mathematica over the last year.
Still reading? Remember how I said I'd constantly remind you of my concert at the Thirsty Ear on May 27? Well, I'm having a concert at the Thirsty Ear on May 27. I'm currently trying to work some of the songs I haven't played in a while back into rotation, and it's proving difficult. I don't remember a lot of the lyrics, and I think maybe my voice used to be higher. It kind of blows my mind that my first album (Perigee) came out almost NINE years ago. Excuse me while I go get my arthritis medication...
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(9 voices cried out |speak to me!)
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| Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
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6:48 pm
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TueNYT - 5:07 clean
Bleh.
Caught up on Reaper this afternoon. (Like House, I had no idea it was back until it had already happened. Man, this strike has screwed up everything.) That show has been steadily improving as the series has progressed, and where it started out totally episodic, now there are several ongoing plotlines I'm really interested in. Hollywood Reporter classified the series as on the bubble but "likely to be renewed." Fingers crossed.
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(speak to me!)
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2:06 pm
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12:59 pm
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God damn, do I love House. The beginning of the season was a little bit iffy, but I think the last two episodes have been close to the best the show's ever been. Characters are being juggled extraordinarily well, and there's a lot of subtle character development happening with both the ex- and current Cottages. And how can you not giggle at "It's also a noun"?
Speaking of House, a Virtual Practice Hunt has been added to the web page for the first ever Post Hunt (descendant of the Tropic/Herald Hunt, a week from Sunday in DC)... is it totally my imagination, or is that Amber (C.B.) playing Clara in the first video? I could be completely wrong, as I'm incredibly bad with faces. (Side note: If I only know you vaguely well, and I pass you on the street and don't make eye contact, it's probably because I'm worried you're actually a stranger and I'm going to embarrass myself if I acknowledge you.)
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(8 voices cried out |speak to me!)
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| Monday, May 5th, 2008
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4:20 pm
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MonNYT - 2:38 clean
Good time to start off the week with.
I have some Steer Roast thoughts, but for various reasons they'll go in a protected entry if I get around to posting them. Which I may not.
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(2 voices cried out |speak to me!)
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| Sunday, May 4th, 2008
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3:52 pm
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SatNYT - 10:27 clean
SunNYT - 18:45 with two errors
Not happy about my performance on either of these... Ten minutes on a Saturday isn't bad normally, but come on, it's Patrick Berry, he of the smooth 'n' easy fill. Even less happy about the Sunday puzzle, which had a lousy inconsistent theme and an unimpressive fill.
But what I'm wicked happy about is Iron Man making over $100 million this weekend! Whooo! It's really exciting to see such big numbers a film which was clearly made as a labor of love, (rather than an easy paycheck) with a main character who doesn't have an automatically huge audience (unlike, say, Spider-Man) and a lead actor who was considered a risky choice but does a fantastic job. Big props to Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr., and everybody else involved.
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(1 voice cried out |speak to me!)
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1:32 pm
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Looks like I finally have to dig out my copy of Guitar Hero III again... Muse pack goes up for download at the end of the week, including "Stockholm Syndrome"(!). Meanwhile, despite the anti-love for Fall Out Boy in the Rock Band community, Harmonix makes me happy with a Tuesday release of "This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race." Love that song.
Iron Man was awesome. I have yet to hear from anyone who disagrees. See it by the end of the day and pump up the box office to the big numbers it deserves.
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(5 voices cried out |speak to me!)
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| Friday, May 2nd, 2008
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3:32 pm
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FriNYT - 6:16 clean
Boo-yah! Eat my dust, Reynaldo! :)
I failed in my Cantabrigian quests both to find a replacement bulb for my office lamp and to sit in on part of Alan's playwriting class. (For the former, they had two bulbs matching the specs I wrote down that were clearly different sizes... for the latter, spring class locations are no longer listed on the Interweb. Now that's just silly. What if students forget where their classes meet... um... three months into the semester?
But I'm at MIT (Building 66 cluster) and wristbanding starts in a half hour. Time to forget about combinatorial number theory for forty-eight hours and Sport Roooooast! And get my sexy new beer stein.
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(1 voice cried out |speak to me!)
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