Paper Rock Scissors

Well, we now have our first homework set of the semester. Blah. Yvette handed out an assignment in Mesoscale on Friday, and then we’ll get one in Cloud Physics on Monday. The semester’s definitely beginning to get into full gear now. And I think in Dynamics on Friday, a bunch of us started fully realizing just how tough that class is gonna be. I’m actually getting kinda scared about that class now, I sense that it’s gonna be a challenge just to keep my head above water in there.
After classes, with it being Friday evening, several of us went to the Sports Cafe for team trivia, as is our weekly habit. After last week’s disappointing 5th place finish, we decided to redouble our efforts and focus, leading to a 1st place finish for our team, “El Cafe de Deportes.” Go us. Free wings next week!
Once trivia was done we all went down to The Brewery, a bar I hadn’t ever been to before. It’s kind of a dive, actually. The place has a couple of interesting large murals that somewhat parody Michaelangelo’s art; one giant mural is of the “David” sculpture, except he’s holding a bottle of Rolling Rock in one hand… and it’s next to the hallway that goes to the men’s room. The other is a take-off on the scene from the Sistine Chapel where God is reaching down to touch Adam’s hand, except God’s reaching a glass of beer down to Adam, while holding a pitcher in the other hand. Interesting parodies. There was a band playing at The Brewery too, Mr Hand. Meh, they were okay, not all that good. Maybe one of these times I’ll happen to run into a decent band that’s playing here in State College. The bar also held a free Paper, Rock, Scissors tournament, and got a bunch of people to sign up, and our table represented well. I won my first round against some random person, in my second round I hung on to beat Vic, but then I fell in the third round to Frame, who went on to finish in second overall. That means he gets to come back again before spring break to PRS it up for a chance to win a free trip to Las Vegas for the national Paper, Rock, Scissors tournament, with a $25,000 prize going to the winner. I was just stunned to find out that there’s a national tourney for this in the first place, but congrats to Frame. He’d definitely appreciate a trip to Vegas more than I would’ve anyway. But we all had a grand time hanging out like usual, and it was a bit after 1am when the last of us called it a night and headed home. I love Friday nights. 🙂
This morning (Saturday) P. Allen, Daniel & I went up to the Bryce Jordan Center for the men’s basketball game between Penn State & Ohio State. It was the first PSU b-ball game for both Daniel & I, and we picked a pretty good one, even though the Nittany Lions lost to the Buckeyes 75-64. Penn State hung close for most of the game, so it was actually a pretty good atmosphere with a somewhat lively crowd, unlike what it usually is for Penn State basketball. I was just happy to see that they played Ohio State better than they did a couple weeks ago in Columbus, when the Buckeyes throttled Penn State 104-69, in a game that, sadly, wasn’t even as close as that score might indicate. But the halftime entertainment was totally worth the $5 price of admission just by itself, this guy was playing tunes on a big electric keyboard with a bunch of balls that he was simultaneously juggling. No description of mine here is really gonna do it justice, but I’d have to say it was the coolest halftime show I’ve ever personally witnessed at a sporting event. Seriously, it was absolutely awesome.
I also found out from my parents today that my younger brother Jake was in a bit of a car accident. My parents got a call from the police this morning wondering where he was, because they’d found his car smashed up in Rice Lake (it’d crashed into some cement wall or barrier or somethin), with the airbags deployed and blood in the car, and bloody footprints leading away from the scene. He apparently stumbled to a friend’s house and spent the rest of the night there before calling my parents to tell them of the accident. He still really doesn’t remember anything about the accident, as far as I’m aware, and we don’t know the cause of the accident at this point since he has no memory of it. So anyway they got him to the hospital, and they were pretty sure he had a broken sternum and a cracked vertebra along with somethin wrong with his hip, because he was in a fair bit of pain and whatnot. Fortunately all the x-rays and CAT scans came back negative, he only has deep bruises and no fractures. But he’ll have to miss at least a week of work, kind of a bummer for him. The bigger bummer for him though, even bigger than his car being wrecked and his sustaining some injuries, is that he just got a letter in the mail informing him that his car insurance was being cancelled on the 19th (I’m not sure why). The accident was on the 20th. Major bummer, that’s not good. Anyways, Jake, if you read this, I hope you get better soon.
Other than that excitement and going to the basketball game I’ve basically been taking it easy the rest of the day, finishing up my grading from the first week and watching some fantastic college basketball on TV (including Duke losing! That always brightens my day!). For the last couple hours though I watched an exciting Australian Open match between 2nd-seeded (and heavily favoured) Andy Roddick and world 54th-ranked (and previously virtually unknown) Marcos Baghdatis from Greek Cyprus. Roddick always hits the ball so hard and has absolutely smoking serves, but Baghdatis, driven on by a very rowdy cheering section (Melbourne has the largest Greek population of any city outside Greece), stunned Roddick in four sets to make it into the quarterfinals. He absolutely blew him away and completely out-powered Roddick, it was jaw-dropping to watch. Baghdatis put on quite the display, and injected some excitement into the men’s side of the tournament. It’ll be fun to see if he makes it to the final for a likely matchup with Roger Federer.
Catch ya’ll on the flip side.