I just got a very vehement email from my SOAN advisor, who is leading the Moscow study group. She forwarded us an editorial from the NY Times about how Bush's Texas buddies are getting the best deal from the "stimulus package" going through Congress. At the top of it she wrote this diatribe about how idiotic the war in Afghanistan is. At the end she insinuated that the point of this war is to get access to the oil reserves in the Caspian Sea basin. I personally think she's being a little too cynical, but it fits the kind of things she said last year when I had her in class. She really likes to mention the fact that Bush's grandfather Prescott suported the Nazis.

My post about the Post editorial got screwed up, so that it merged with the next post down and I couldn't get to the edit link to fix it. I got all worked up, and wound up viewing source on the lower Blogger window, stealing the address of that edit link, and typing it directly into the address bar. Then Amanda pointed out the "enter safe mode" link, whose alt tag says "If you accidentally type some bad HTML that renders the edit link for that post unreachable, click here." D'oh.

An open message to all people I might ever talk to about my Anthropology honors project:

I've already talked to Jordan Kerber about it!

It's really frustrating when anyone I try to ask about archaeology on Oneida sites just refers me to Prof. Kerber. I know he's the expert. He was the first person I talked to. Now I'm looking for some non-Keber perspectives. I don't want the subtitle of my paper to be "What Jordan Told Me."

More proof that my future lies in journalism: I was reading this editorial, and I started thinking, "you know, this feels more like a commentary or signed opinion column than an editorial." (Yes, there are subtle stylistic differences. The one that got me here was that editorials tend to be less conversational and personal.)

Maybe it's a sign that I should be going into journalism instead of geography that, when I was looking through the Guide to Programs in Geography in the United States and Canada I was more bothered by the poor formatting of the chart than I was by the lack of schools with a specialty in cultural ecology or Australia/Oceania.

Emerging Corpses A Dilemma For Inuit
All I can say is, Elena darn well better put this in World & Nation this week...

I have to stop looking at this page so I can get some work done.

Crap.

My anthropology seminar paper depended on interviewing people from the Oneida Nation and local archaeologists. The archaeologists are working out fine. I finally got a hold of the Oneida Nation today. They gave me the runaround for a bit, and finally Mark Emmery told me they don't do interviews for students. So half of my paper suddenly disappeared.

I should have majored in Chemistry. Sulfuric acid never refuses to talk to you.

A few I forgot:

Students Take Lord's Name In Vain, doo-dah, doo-dah
Coach Vaughn Loses Will To Live, oh doo-dah day

We Went To The Metrodome, doo-dah, doo-dah
Didn't Get Stuff For My Dad, oh doo-dah day.

Bible Was In Sinhalese, doo-dah, doo-dah
Kokopelli On A Stick, oh doo-dah day

Yes, Denver and Detroit are different places, hard as it is for my brain to accept that.

The Pep Band trip to the University of Minnesota
In convenient "Camptown Races" format:

Had A Knife In My Backpack, doo-dah, doo-dah.
Plane Staff Confiscated It, oh doo-dah day.

Colgate Beaten Shamefully, doo-dah, doo-dah
Raiders Shut Out Twice On Road, oh doo-dah day.

Minnesota Crowd Was Lame, doo-dah, doo-dah
But They Can Spell Their State's Name, oh doo-dah day.

Gopher Band Was Really Big, doo-dah, doo-dah
One Whole Bus Of Alto Sax, oh doo-dah day

Cannon Man Announced The Score, doo-dah, doo-dah
A Chair Was Reserved For Him, oh doo-dah day.

Pie Shop Claimed The World's Best Pies, doo-dah, doo-dah
And I Think That They Were Right, oh doo-dah day.

Had To Eat At Burger King, doo-dah, doo-dah.
Only Got One Onion Ring, oh doo-dah day.

I'm off to Minnesota. Maybe when I get back Sunday night I'll have something worthwhile to say.

You're all going to think I'm insane, but I thought the weather today was really great. It was a great feeling having it cool and damp, but not cold or windy. And on top of that, it's fall. The trees on the path from Cushman to the Student Union (the deciduous ones, anyway) hit the exact right spot in their color-changing. I'm going to have to go by with the digital camera today before it gets dark. Maybe it's just because this was the kind of day I first fell in love (for lack of a less corny phrase) with Colgate on my first visit.

Gah. I don't have words for things anymore. I've been writing all these two-sentence posts for weeks. Eventually I'll write something worthwhile, I promise.

I just used "tantamount" and "anathema" in the same sentence. Go me.

Chechens Seek Peace Talks
Could it be? More good news?

IRA Disarmament Hailed As Breakthrough
Finally, some good news about terrorism. Let's see how quickly this one falls through. (Although, to be fair, Northern Ireland has been making progress over the years. Unlike certain other terrorism-plagued regions I could name...)

mmm, produce. (thank you Hesitant Firmness.)

Your exact words were, "Jesus can't save me. Allah can't save me. George Bush can't save me." Those were your exact words.

The point here being that even from the worst show, you can still glean one useful tidbit.

1) It's generally considered poor form for a DJ to spend more time disparaging the news report than actually reading it.

2) A hockey game just isn't the same when they order the 'Gates not to sing "O, Canada."

3) All forms of rap, hip-hop, nyte flyte are basketball music, not hockey music.

4) Grand Buffet is much better when they're focussing on random weirdness, rather than drunken sexual frustration. (And they didn't say "suck the D" once).

5) I'm glad I didn't see Lord Grunge naked.

6) It wasn't nearly as cold today as I thought it would be.

7) "Warm up the bus" is much more fun when you have 10 keys instead of one.

8) 31 to 5 is a weird football score. Not as weird as 25 to 5, though.

It's fall. Huzzah.

Israel's Tourism Minister Assassinated
Massive retalliation seems likely.

Bang head here -----------> X

Today I went to Oneida with Compter and her friends "Berk" and "Taco." In theory this was to drop me off at the oral surgeon who was going to do x-rays so they could take my wisdom teeth out. We got there early, so we went to Taco Bell. I don't like Taco Bell, which worked out fine because I had eaten and brushed my teeth before we left. I was able to make Compter's day by explaining that History did in fact count for a social science distribution. Berk was a bit distressed that her bean burrito contained a solid cylinder of bean substance and unmelted cheese.

Then we went to the medical building. They dropped me off and headed to WalMart. I walked in the door and found the office of Joesph T Rowbottom in Suite F. The lights were off, and the door was locked. So I called Compter from Suite A and read an exciting essay about the census in 19th century India while they finished shopping at WalMart. And then we came home. I had a message on my phone (I don't know what time it was left) saying Dr. Rowbottom had the flu. So now it will probably be November before I can get a new appointment. It might almost be easier to just have my home dentist do it over Christmas break. Except that deciding that would probably trigger another abcess, as some twisted form of cosmic justice.

1) Apparently if you visit Onieda you have to stop at Taco Bell. Or so says Sarah Compter. And speaking of Compter, I got a hit from a Google search for COMPTER'S. It was surprising how many of the results that came up along with mine were mispellings of "computer's."

2) This is an interesting commentary. At first I thought it was going to be something along the lines of "Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is dreadfully wrong, therefore his money is dirty and Giuliani shouldn't have accepted it." And I doubt giving back the money is going to inspire the Prince to do any of the stuff Friedman reccommends. But it's good to have Arab and Muslim leaders' role in setting the stage for terrorism pointed out as a balance to the theme of "of course the terrorists are mad about how much the US screwed up in the Middle East," which itself is a necessary balance to "they're just evil people and the US can do no wrong."

Oh, and Beth finally updated. Huzzah.

I restarted, and suddenly Abraham is OK. I know I restarted during the incredible slowness episode -- it's about the limit of my computer fixing knowledge -- and it didn't help. But this time it did. *shrug* Windows still can't find load.exe, though.

And now instead of doing work I'm reveling in the fast computer until dinnertime. Yay work ethic.

I can't keep going like this. Abraham is running r e a l l y s l o w . . . Every time anything happens -- even just receiving an IM -- he freezes for a few seconds. The clock lost an hour over the course of last night. There's no point in listening to WinAmp, because all it does is skip. And it's been getting worse. I defragmented last night, and that didn't help any. It may have something to do with the fact that whenever I start him up, I get a message that says Windows can't find "load.exe."

So it seems I'm Amanda's bitch.

On Thursday, a box of Bart Simpson chocolate peanut butter cereal appeared on Dave's desk, and a box of Homer Simpson cinnamon donuts cereal appeared on Marty's. We were discussing who could have done it, and narrowed the suspects down to Jesse and Amanda. So we had a trial. Amanda showed up just as we were getting ready, so I was appointed to confine the suspect in the kitchen. She tried to make a break for it, and I had to wrestle her to the ground.

Meredith was the judge, using Dave's geology hammer as a gavel. April-Lyn was the bailiff, and had us swear on the quantum physics book to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you Schroedinger." Dave was the prosecuting attorney. I was the court-appointed defense attorney. The jury was Jeff, Mikey, Missi, and Atticus, and they were drinking all through the trial.

Amanda got off on the two counts of cereal box planting, but was found guilty of one count of rigging Dave's door with a tennis ball. She later admitted to the tennis ball charge, though she initially lied under oath about it. Perhaps Jeff was right -- as a potential English major, we should have had her swear on Shakespeare.

During the course of the defense, I brought up the Pop Tart incident. This incident occurred when I stopped at Big M and bought blueberry pop tarts for Amanda because she didn't want to go all the way downtown to get them herself. At this point Dave said "let the record show that Stenny is Amanda's bitch." I objected, citing the fact that I was going downtown anyway in order to cash a check at the bank, which is just across the street from Big M. Meredith decided to let the jury rule on this charge. They pronounced me guilty.

At this point I could potentially have appealed to a higher court (if I could find one). But then Marty remembered that he had some bitch rights over me from the orientation issue, when he kept getting me to write stories for News. So he signed those over to Amanda. So even if I wasn't her bitch before, I am now, as she has, if nothing else, the bitch rights that once belonged to Marty.

We have Whitlams! Repeat, we have new Whitlams. Well, not really new -- the album (Undeniably) was recorded in 1994. The sound is somewhat different from the later two (Eternal Nightcap and Love This City), but I suppose that's to be expected given that co-founder Stevie Plunder was still alive for Undeniably.

Now I just have to be careful that Amanda and Maggie don't steal it.

The InterLibrary Loan slip attached to Preservation On The Reservation lists me as "stentor, d," which is crossed out and replaced by "Danielson, S." Ah, the perks of having a weird name.

Try again...

A test, for Dave.

I like the weather we've been having. A lot. Yesterday morning I woke up and saw snow on the roof, and I could smell the cold air coming in through Marty's window, which I had forgotten to close. And it just felt like I was really home. Today I walked downtown, and on the way home I was kicking the layer of leaves that was laying across the sidewalk. The smell of fall leaves is one of my favorite smells in the world. On the corner across from '34 House I saw the oak trees were still green, but some of the smaller trees around them were bare already. This is why I will never move to Australia.

I don't say this often, but I've found a neat poem (courtesy of Amanda). There's generally something I just don't get about poetry. Maybe it's how essentialised the thoughts become when you turn them into a short poem. Stephen R. Donaldson said something in his introduction to Daughter of Regals about how novel writing is like throwing words at your subject and hoping some stuck, whereas in short story writing you have to pick your words carefully and stick them on your subject -- in the pocket, or tucked behind the ears. I think this can be extended farther to poetry. My brain is just not subtle enough to see how the words are placed around the subject, like a connect-the-dots with too few dots. I guess that's why I like "Jabberwocky" so much -- because it's all about the sound of it, not the content.

"Marginalia" worked for me, though. Maybe it's because the verse was so free that I read it like a short bit of prose that was broken up by repeated e-mail forwarding (though mercifully sans greater-than signs/closing angle brackets/carrots). So I could take it as prose (doubtless missing a lot of subtlety, but grasping the thrust of it). This would be a good place to launch into a tangent about how reading things off the computer screen affects the reading experience, and the making of marginalia in particular. Or I could talk about my own experiences with marginalia -- buying my books early so I could get the least underlined ones, or drawing a cartoon at the end of Genealogy of Morality of a guy saying "I'm Friedrich 'the colossal ignoramus' Nietzsche, and I hope you liked my crappy book!" But unfortunately I have school work to finish.

Oh, and I have to endorse anything that refers to Swift's "A Modest Proposal."

An email from home:

Hi,
We just found out some exciting news. Dad and all you kids are related to GW Bush!!!!!! Barbara Bush's maiden name is Pierce. She is from the long line of New England Pierces that is related to President Pierce just like Granny. So somewhere along the family tree , you are related to your hero and mine GW Bush!!!!!! Isn't that exciting? I'm so jealous cause I'm not related to Bar.
So now you know, you're related to 2 presidents. I'll quit writing now cause I'm sure you want to go to tell all your friends the good news!!
Bye,
MOM

W're off to Princeton soon for the football game over Fall break. It's like freshman year again. Except that freshman year we went to Navy and did sit-ups on the sidelines when we scored, whereas now we're going to Princeton to be prohibited from swearing. And freshman year I didn't have so much gosh darn razzin--frazzin' work to do when I got back.

"Thankyou for your Interest in Groove Revolution.com, Houston's connection for all that is Music!

Your Questions or comments will be replied to A.S.A.P.

We want to give you and Business or band the voice on the web it deserves at a excellent price.

Thanks: webmaster@grooverevolution.com"

This is an odd twist on spam.

ChaosMusic finally shipped Undeniably..., the Whitlams' second album. Ahh, soon we shall have more Whitlammy goodness. Oh yes.

I'm not sure what my problem is this year. I feel like I have more work than I know what to do with. I have so much work that I can't even think of a new idiom to describe it aside from "more than I know what to do with."

The thing is, I don't really have that much work. I'm a social science major, for crying out loud. I've got extracurriculars, but not significantly more than last semester. And I only have a real position of responsibility on The Maroon-News. Yet somehow I have all this reading, and writing, and researching hanging over my head.

I was really busy last semester, too, since I was taking five classes. But I still found the time to check the Brunching UBB every day (which takes up at least 2 hours a day if you read all the major fora), and to read the news regularly, and to talk to Christine for inordinate amounts of time every day. Now this semester, I'm only taking four classes and I'm single again, and yet I've had to give up on the UBB and barely follow the news enough to crank out a commentary every week. And I'm sure you've noticed I don't post much of substance here anymore.

I feel like I must have lost any time management skills I ever had. I don't feel like more of a slacker now, but I must be, because I seem to be getting less done in more time. It probably doesn't help that I'm sitting here writing this instead of reading the huge stack of books on my desk.

When I woke up, I had "Charlie No. 2 (Buy Now, Pay Later)" stuck in my head. But somehow, on the walk up the hill, Charlie acquired two turntables and a microphone.

(hmmm ... not publishing properly...)

I've been worried about Marty for the past few days. Looking at the length of this post, I ought to drop in some foreshadowing that I'm not quite so worried anymore. I suppose the worry started when he started his blog, because some of the stories he wrote there showed me parts of him I hadn't realised existed. It's really easy to just see Marty as the single most considerate person on the planet. I remember Barbara saying, after she had spent just a weekend at our house, "I think Marty is the nicest person I've ever met." And that aspect is definitely there. But I was seeing other things about him. At the time it was more of a background confusion, because I didn't quite understand and I didn't know to what extent he had dealt with these things.

Then there was Saturday night. Marty got very drunk, drunker than he should have been. I don't know the circumstances surrounding it -- why he was drinking, what his attitude was, and so on. I had spent the evening with Dave, Amanda, and April-Lyn, first at the Victory At Sea/Mary Timony concert, and then at the Barge. When we got home, Marty was asleep in his bed. I went upstairs to work on my geography seminar paper. At about 1:30 I looked over and I saw a splash of yellow jump from his mouth into the windowsill. I ran downstairs and fetched Dave and Meredith. We tried to wake Marty, but he wouldn't come to for more than a second or two at a time. I was feeling pretty helpless, because I knew I should be able to help him, but I didn't know what I should do. Eventually I found Bridget's phone number, and she reccommended calling 911. So Dave called, and Campus Safety came on down. I got the feeling it was pretty routine for them to deal with this kind of thing. I've just been sheltered because my friends generally drink so moderately. Marty woke up enough that we could get him to the Campus Safety jeep and take him to the emergency room.

Dave, Meredith, and I stayed with Marty in the ER until about 3:15. There was a kid in the next bed who had cut his hand up pretty bad, and was making a lot of loud wisecracks. One of the hospital staff asked us when Colgate was going to become a dry campus. The nurses seemed fairly routine about the whole thing, as I suppose they have to be on a campus with such a strong alcohol presence. Marty spent most of the time apologizing. It was hard to explain to him that we were just doing what friends ought to do. My main worry was that he seemed more concerned by what he had done to us than about the harm he could have caused himself.

Yesterday and today he seemed to go back to normal. It made it hard to really feel the need to work things out. It was a lot easier to consider Saturday night in terms of particular circumstances, most of which I didn't know about because I wasn't around, and less in terms of systemic issues. Jeanine, whose advice I've come to respect a great deal, told me quite forcefully that I ought to find some help for Marty. But once she signed off, I wasn't sure how accurate her diagnosis could be from only hearing my descriptions of the situation. And I didn't know how I could raise the subject without making Marty feel worse.

Then I read in Marty's blog that he was going to talk to ResLife about possibly leaving the house. At that point I knew I had to talk to him, so I asked him about it.

My talk with Marty was a bit awkward. There were a lot of empty spaces, because I never really learned how to have a heart-to-heart talk with anyone. I don't talk seriously with my friends very much. At least, not in such a personal way. But it was a good talk to have. I got the feeling that Marty is dealing with what's been happening to him. He seems to understand where he needs to go. And I think he's finding out how much everyone here does care about him. I told him, in complete honesty, that he's the best roommate I've ever had (which is not to slight Eric, Matt, Gary, or Joe -- I've been unusually lucky in terms of roommates). I really want to see him work through things, and I'm more optimistic now that that's going to happen.

Then I put my headphones on, and WRCU was playing "Detachable Penis." It's kind of funny how suddenly I can shift mental states, because within seconds I was bopping along with King Missile and griping to myself about how whatever SOURCe did to my computer logged me out of Blogger and the New York Times.

I'm not a fan of the trick test questions.