Boom-da-da-boom-da-d—

I was walking back from the Warehouse, and a Ford Excursion with chrome rims rolled up at the red light next to me. The bass it was putting out easily surpassed anything that I've ever heard from an automobile, and I think I could even hear the glass of the car behind it and the windows in the building next to me vibrating. The twenty-something driver was looking rather pleased with himself, and the girl in the front seat seemed impressed—until the light turned green, that is. Almost as soon as the signal changed, the SUV stalled, the music went silent, and all I could hear were the usual sounds of a car starting up. I guess he must have diverted a little too much juice to his beats.

A trip to Wal-Mart

I'm not a Wal-Mart fan, but Nate's parents (who eat organic foods and buy their cars based on Consumer Reports reviews) don't choose to fight that particular battle, so to Wal-Mart we went, and I wasn't as pained as I might have been. I did try to complete my more significant purchases at Minneapolis-based (and Guthrie-sponsoring) Target, but I bought a few little things from the Evil Empire, one of which was a rubber stopper for our kitchen sink. It took much looking, but finally I found one (while looking for something else, actually). The package had no brand name, but was simply marked "Sink Stopper." On the back it had a list of features to recommend it:

· PVC Material
· Flexible Snug Fit
· Unique Soft Grip
· Convenient Octopus Design

Yes, the thing is molded to look like an octopus sitting on top of a disc. Moreover the octopus has a face with two circles for eyes and one for a mouth. I seem to remember a Beanie Baby with similar anatomical incorrectness, but this one's a whole lot creepier. Yes—I think 'creepy' is definitely more accurate than 'convenient.'

Thinking(?) outside the box

The back of my Life cereal box asks me to unscramble the following emotions exhibited by Curious George: CORUIUS / HYPPA / SDA. I know cereal box games cater to a very young crowd, but this is just DEPRSSEING.

Orange closer to yellow than Cardinal

Two years at the University of Wisconsin – Madison have spoiled me. The campus has not one, but two major student newspapers of reasonably high quality. I was always a fan of The Daily Cardinal, but my preference stemmed primarily from the presence of the fabulously funny comic "Everyone Drunk But Me" by Laura Beth Brandt and the slightly smaller size of the paper. Both it and its major competitor, The Badger Herald had a good selection of news, sports, and human interest stories. (Though not a constant reader I liked the Herald enough to apply for a position on its staff.)

Syracuse University isn't nearly so fortunate. Only one major student paper can be found here, and I suspect this lack of competition is a contributing factor to the overall trashiness of The Daily Orange. The articles are often little more than thinly veiled complaints, the comics are only funny if you are stuck by their randomness, and the sports section is monstrously overgrown (although I realize that this is probably not a bad thing given the readership). As for "human interest" stories - well let's say they take that a little too literally. You can see what I mean in this bit from yesterday's piece "Strap Tease" by Erin Hendricks and Katie Walsh:

Bra Unhooking 101:
- Check to make sure she's actually wearing a bra
- Ease her shirt off
- Feel her up to check on the clasp location

If it's on the back:
- Keep making out while moving your hand to the middle of the back of her bra
- Put your thumb on one side of the clasp, and your fingers on the other
- Pull together, and the bra will unhook easily

If it's on the front:
- Keep making out and move your hand to the front of her bra
- Squeeze the clasp together with your thumb and forefinger
- Twist clasp and lift up on the hook
- The bra will open and leave you with an eyeful of breasts

[...]

What the experts say...
"Whenever I'm drunk and can't speak, let alone get a bra off, I just push it up over the prize."
- Matt Smith, sophomore computer engineering major

"One time I was hanging out with a lady, kind of drunk, and I was looking around for a solid 30-40 seconds for a clasp before I realized it was a sports bra."
- Mike McQueeny, sophomore political science major

"If you're fooling around with a girl who's wearing a black bra and took her own shirt off, take the bra off one-handed. But if you're with a girl who's wearing a white bra and you have to do it all, go with two hands - it'll make you seem like you don't have as much sex."
- Ryan Donnelly, sophomore accounting major

I wish I could say this was anomalous.

Live from the Centro

It's thirteen past one in the morning, and I'm sitting on bus 9950, traveling route 344 from College Place to Slocum Heights via Euclid and Westcott. There are eighteen passengers in addition to myself, and two of them are unbelievably drunk. Both are girls, and I'd wager freshmen (or maybe lightweight sophomores), and they are two of the loudest people I've ever encountered. They've been "singing" (shouting) the whole ride; I recognized "Maria" from Santana's album Supernatural but none of the others. "Jake," who's also had a few drinks but is handling his liquor far better asked them to be quiet, and now they're quite upset with him. One of them is taking a rather aggressive approach, accusing him of being a square, being sexually frustrated, being a closet homosexual (in far less polite terms). The other is trying to get him involved in "the fun," trying to show him how his own evening activities should make him as easygoing as them. Jake's keeping his cool.

The girls got off four stops too early. They had intended to ride to my stop. I'm not complaining.

Napoleon's cousin?

For a short while today, I thought I might be sitting with Napoleon Dynamite or maybe a close cousin of that infamous high school outcast. I went to the Honors Student Organization spring kickoff meeting (primarily for the free pizza but also to be the first to hear what sort of activities will be coming up). Nothing sounded outrageously cool except for the possible opportunity to get subsidized tickets to The Producers, but I'm hoping that the regularly occurring events such as the Chicago trip will happen even if they weren't mentioned.

I was one of the first to arrive, and I soon found the chairs around me taken by a couple of bespectacled white guys, both of whom were first years with a lot of advanced standing credits. And one of them sounded just like Napoleon Dynamite. He didn't have Napoleon's temper (I never heard him say "Whatever I feel like I wanna do, gosh!"), but his voice was quite similar, and he had that same unusual but not unpleasant awkwardness. What actually amused me more was that both guys talked a great deal about their advanced standing credits, saying how hard it was to decide if they should call themselves freshmen or juniors. After talking to me about it for about three minutes straight, they confided in me that they just call themselves "first years" so no one thought they were too proud of their standing. I've actually done just that on a number of occasions, so I know what they mean, but I was still amused that they unknowingly tried to impress the one guy in the room who will graduate at a younger age than they will. I think they would have continued to pursue the topic if I hadn't been rescued by the arrival of my buddy Les Chappell.

My neck of the woods

Ryan, the instructor of my Environmental Conservation course, seems to be a full out Mac-geek, and before class today I had developed a theory that his favorite toy is the 360°-panorama feature of Quicktime. He'd started two of the first three lectures by spinning us around a photographed landscape, and the trend continued today. This time we got the exciting opportunity to look around a farm in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, the suburb directly east of my hometown of Maple Grove. Ryan told us that it was an example of "regulation of landscape." I asked him why he had chosen Brookly Park of all places. He answered that there were only a limited number of sites that have been recorded in a panorama. I think my theory holds.

KO'd

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings have established themselves as sleepy-time. I have two fifty-minute lectures back to back. This first one (Environmental Conservation) moves very slowly and puts me in a state of drowsiness. The second one (Ancient and Medieval Art) is reasonably interesting but takes place in a dark room with padded chairs, which thus far has made sleep unavoidable. I do not want to sleep through Art History; I want to learn the material. I'm considering two option to amend the present situation. I can start drinking a glass with Mountain Dew with breakfast, hoping that the caffeine will keep me awake without making me to antsy to focus. I'm not keen on this idea, since caffeine sometimes makes me feel irrationally trapped. The other option that readily presents itself is to start skipping the first class some days, and just reading the lecture outlines off of the website. I'm not thrilled with this plan either, since I don't like to miss lectures, but I have to say that today's class encouraged me to go in this direction.

The instructor's prepared lecture ended when we still had ten minutes remaining. He managed to start up a loose discussion among the students about Native American's effect on the land and whether European travelers were coming to a largely natural or a substantially cultivated landscape. The lecture had covered shifting agriculture, controlled burns, irrigation and other methods employed by the indigenous peoples, and the following discussion revolved around how invasive or how "natural" the techniques were. Opinions varied widely. One male student argued that it's better to compare Native Americans to river-damming beavers that to the Europeans that invaded the continent. One female student said that the excessive hunting of beavers by natives during the fur trading era proves that Native Americans never had any more respect for the land than Europeans. I tend to fall in between these two views, for I feel that both have merit. But I was annoyed when one girl said she wondered what "the Native American perspective on the matter" was. Our instructor (I won't call him a professor because he had yet to earn is PhD) said that she presented an interesting question, and then he asked if anyone in the room was of Native American heritage. I didn't like where this was heading, so I interrupted, "I'd like to point out that the various nations and tribes of North America would likely have widely varying views on this matter. I've been researching the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; there are two groups of people living there, the Gwich'in and the Iñupiat. The the Iñupiat are the poster tribe of Big Oil and firmly support drilling in the area, and the Gwich'in are fighting tooth and nail to preserve the land. I think it's too simple to think of there being a single 'Native American perspective.'" The instructor said that I had an excellent point. He continued on that his own wife was one-eighth Native American, and that she had been surprised to learn that her ancestors had employed substantial landscape-altering techniques, so we shouldn't assume there is a single view. I didn't try to participate after that.

Unclear

I popped into The University Bookstore this morning on my way to class to pick up a new notebook for my MWF classes and a couple of cards for some birthdays that are coming up in the next couple of months. I couldn't find a birthday card I liked (all that had fun covers had irritating attempts at humor within), so I reverted to my usual plan B and tried to find a quirky blank card. I think I succeeded, and grabbed a pair of the same design (which I won't describe beyond saying that they're a touch on the fuzzy side). I went to pay, and the check-out woman praised me for what great cards I had chosen. While I felt 'great' was too strong a word, I simply said that I hoped that the recipients would agree with her. She looked at me with a puzzled expression and asked me who was sick. I assumed she had misheard me (the 'si' sound is in both words), so I said, "oh, no, I said recipients." But that didn't seem to do if for her. "Recipients:" I continued hesitantly, "the people who will be receiving the cards." This was apparently what was needed to clear things up, for she smiled and gave me a good natured "oh, I see!"

Joe Ienuso, Chair of the Emergency Management Operations Team and Acting Vice President of Facilities Management at Columbia University emailed me just a few minutes ago and warned me that New York City may be getting up to a foot of snow this weekend. I wish I could be there to go walking through Central Park early one of these snowy mornings.