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May 18, 2006
Tuesday Night Tour
The Minnesota Twins have been wreaking havoc with my emotions lately. Prior to last week they've mostly been playing poorly, but they really started playing well heading into their series with division-leading Chicago. Last Saturday night I watched them on WGN (having to suffer through the annoying Chicago announcers) as they came from behind to beat the White Sux 8-4, making me hopeful for a 3-1 series win, or even possibly a sweep. So then on Sunday night, to celebrate the Twins being on ESPN and me actually being able to watch my team on TV, a rare occurrence out here in central PA, I had Jeff and Daniel over to my place. Talk about a strange game. The White Sox scored 3 in the top of the 1st, and would've scored more if it weren't for three Twins web gems. Then the bottom of the 1st came around, and the Twins scored 7 runs before they had their second out of the inning. And then they didn't score the rest of the game, partly aided by a White Sox triple play, the first in the majors in over a year, which allowed the Whities to win 9-7. Sigh. And now since then they've also lost their next three games. Time to get back to being a demoralized Twins fan I guess.
Monday evening I got myself up to a 15-minute run, 4 minutes longer than I was doing last week. Yay for progress. Then after making myself supper, I totally forgot that President Bush was giving an address to the nation about illegal immigration, and instead watched some Stargate SG-1. But it's probably a good thing I forgot about Bush's speech, because I likely would have thrown my dinner at the TV in response (well, probably not quite that, but you get the idea). Bush definitely blew a golden opportunity to take leadership on this issue that he's been shirking for his six years in office, but instead of actually doing something about stopping further illegal immigration, he's choosing to address the issue with symbolism, in sending a few National Guard troops down to the border, but not allowing them to do anything. And now Mexico is threatening to sue the United States -- in American courts -- if the National Guard actually does anything to stem the tide of illegal immigrants streaming across the border. That alone should be a wake-up call on the issue, but unfortunately the majority of the politicians in Washington in both parties are sound asleep.
Tuesday was wings day again, and Daniel & I were joined by Mario & Jacob, who had just finished the second day/half of the Ph.D. candidacy exam. They showed me the questions that were on the test, and while the physical meteorology portion of the exam seems potentially doable, the dynamics half of the exam is absolutely impossible. The candidacy exam as a whole frightens me, but the dynamics portion scares me to death, and is a large reason why I'm currently leaning towards entering the real world after I get my Master's next year. But then Tuesday evening, a pretty good-sized group of us meteo grad students, 
even several of us who didn't take the candidacy exam this week, got together to celebrate the official end of the semester for everyone. It was quite the little tour of downtown State College we had going, starting out at the Sports Cafe, then moving on to Zeno's, the Rathskeller, the Darkhorse, the Saloon, Beulah's, and finally wrapping up the evening at the Gingerbread Man. But no tour would be complete without t-shirts, so Jacob & Stephanie bought a bunch of plain white t-shirts and some markers so people could come up with their own creative sayings, 
such as Mario's "I'm Unconditionally Unstable," Jacob's "I Took the Meteo Candidacy Exam and all I Got Was This Shirt," and Dave's scattering/absorption radiative transfer equation. Amber & Kerrie decided to take it a slightly different route, with drawings of "Death by Dendrite" and "Death by Shear" respectively, but David had, in my opinion, the best shirt of the night: "Cyclogenesis Killed My Mom: I Demand Vengeance," complete with a low pressure center and a couple of fronts drawn on. Yes, we're nerds. Huge nerds. But if you're wondering what I put on my shirt, you're out of luck because I didn't make one. I know, I'm super lame for not further showing off my nerdiness, but I figure my GAC Physics t-shirts are nerdy enough. :-) At any rate it was a really fun evening for everyone, and I managed to stick out the tour right to the very end.
Not long after I got to Walker today I happened to get sucked into a group meeting as I was walking by in the hallway. Considering they said that some of what they were discussing was going to pertain to my future thesis, I wonder why they didn't let me know about it, you know, before the meeting or something, instead of with just 10-15 minutes left. Oh well. But then this afternoon I finally found out what office I'll be moving to, up in 627 in the anteroom to Dr Wyngaard's office, sharing space with Sanjiv and Mark, two of Dr Wyngaard's students. I am somewhat curious why I'm being moved up there, since both of them are, at best, tangentially related to the research I'm doing, especially since there are several other people who will be doing somewhat more similar stuff down on 4th floor. Since most of the other meteo grads are down on 4th floor that's where I'd prefer to have my office too, but perhaps I'll get a little more work done being on 6th floor. So Sanjiv & I spent a bit of time this afternoon swapping desks and tables of various sizes in and out of the room and constantly rearranging the room trying to make the best use of the space. We finally got it to our liking, but I still can't move up there for awhile because there's no computer for me as of yet. Apparently that little detail was somehow overlooked by my advisor, and since Joel's grant doesn't allow for the purchase of any new hardware, I'm hoping that Dr Wyngaard (or Dr Stauffer or somebody else in the group) has some money to buy me a computer so that I can actually do work. But until then I'll still be hanging out in the TA office (530), because at least I have a computer there, even though it's gotten rather lonely in that office, with Daniel having moved out last week downstairs to the tropical office, Amber basically moved out to the ozone office, Kerrie doing a lot of work from home, Fangxing not there a whole lot and Muge back home in Turkey for a couple weeks.
Tonight for the PSCG men's group we decided to play a board game, and Monopoly sounded good (at least better than Tim's idea of scaling the walls of certain buildings), as none of us had played it in years. I really don't recall games of Monopoly taking only two hours before, but that's all the longer that this one lasted. Steve really didn't need much time to vanquish Tim, Ben, myself and South African Daniel, but it was still a fun activity, especially when I was able to follow it up with the South Park episode about hippies congregating for a music festival, an absolute classic!
Transferring music and other media is now legal in Australia, though internet piracy is being pursued and punished even more aggressively. I guess even taping a show off the TV was illegal until now Down Under.
Now this is a classic headline: Missing Manure Mystifies Middlefield. Yes, someone called the cops on a manure thief. It's really gonna hit the fan if they catch this person...
Apparently candidates from the Democratic Party for the State of Alabama Attorney General need not believe that the Holocaust actually happened.
A couple of columnists for ESPN have their own ideas for what a new baseball stadium for the Minnesota Twins should look like. I really like the lake in right field and the cornfield in straight-away center.
Visitors to a Danish zoo got an up close and personal look at nature in action. The CNN headline says it all: Bears eat monkey, visitors shocked. I'm surprised this kind of thing doesn't happen more often, but needless to say the zoo is moving the monkeys to a different area.
It seems that the new movie "The Da Vinci Code" isn't as good as it has been billed, as it just got panned by movie critics in Cannes who saw it last night in a sneak preview before wide release. All reports say that the moviegoers actually laughed aloud at one of the key dramatic moments in the film, and that there wasn't even scattered applause once the credits started rolling, only silence from most and a few scattered whistles (boos) from others. I wonder how this news will affect the box office draw of the film.
Apparently a judge in New York thinks that an airplane is a boat with wings, in declaring it subject to maritime laws. Uhhh, ok.
In West Virginia various agencies bickered for three weeks whose responsibility it was to remove a decaying cow from a local river, while the stench became more and more unbearable for area residents, until finally a joint effort removed the rotting cow.
Kudos to Dave F. for sending me the link to a video of a wacky weatherguy in Charlotte. Seriously, this guy has issues. And it isn't made up, this is a real TV meteorologist, only now he's working at a station in Colorado. I haven't yet been able to figure out if he's still "performing" like he did in Charlotte. I seriously can't believe the Charlotte station let this guy do half the stuff he did. Just watch and you'll see what I mean.
Posted by Jared at May 18, 2006 01:14 AM
Comments
First the cartoon fiasco and now bears eating monkeys? This leads me to two observations:
1) Colbert is right--bears are a major threat.
2) No wonder Danes are melancholy.
Sigh. Get your house in order Denmark.
Nice chatting last night Jared. Congrats on being done with the first year of grad school!
Posted by: Kate at May 19, 2006 03:12 PM