Curiouser and Curiouser...

Somerville College automatically blocks access to various websites for various reasons, and www.masonporter.com is being blocked because Somerville classifies it in the category of "Pornography". The page is actually the home page of the bluegrass band "Mason Porter".

Pictures from the road

Courtesy Charles Lee, here is a picture that he and some friends took on a recent road trip.

Wow. That's spectacularly "impressive"... I am extremely amused!

And I definitely appreciate the Blues Brothers reference...

A show with everything but Gary Coleman

Back when I was still living in the United States --- you know, a few weeks ago --- I finally got a chance to see the musical Avenue Q, which I had really wanted to see ever since I first heard about.

Here is part of wikipedia's description of the musical:

The show is largely inspired by (and is in the style of) Sesame Street: Most of the characters in the show are puppets (operated by actors onstage), the set depicts several tenements on a rundown street in an "outer borough" of New York City, both the live characters and puppet characters sing, and short animated video clips are played as part of the story. Also, several characters are recognizably parodies of classic Muppet characters: for example, the roommates Rod and Nicky are versions of Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie, and Trekkie Monster is based on Cookie Monster. However, the characters are in their twenties and thirties and face adult problems instead of those faced by pre-schoolers. The characters use profanity, and the songs concern adult themes

I enjoyed the show very much! The show-stealer was quite clearly the rendition of "The internet is for porn" by Trekkie Monster (with help from some normal people). It was slightly different than the recorded version, and the differences were pretty cool. Trekkie Monster is my favorite character, though it's really too bad that they didn't have a "Do you know what else starts with 'P'?" line... Or maybe a bit of a play on a certain line from The Music Man...

One thing I found out after going to the show was that the "Gary" of the 'normal people' is actually Gary Coleman. This, of course, makes the line about Gary selling all his stuff on eBay even funnier than I thought it was before; in fact, it makes it bloody hilarious! As far as I can tell, the real Gary Coleman has never actually appeared in Avenue Q (which is a shame, because that would be awesome).

Goodbye to Cat!

As I write this entry, Catalin ("Cat") Turc, applied math postdoc and all-around porn expert, is on a flight to Charlotte to start his new life as a faculty member at UNC Charlotte.

It was really fun having lunch with Cat these last couple of years, and I learned more about German porn than I ever thought I would. (In fact, I'm still trying to forget my lessons and I probably will continue on that course for a long time.) I can only hope that in my time in Oxford, I'll be able to recapture the fun I had at lunch with Cat and Lemming. As Lemming says, every barrel has a bottom, and I can only hope he's right.

On Saturday, Lemming, Cat, Cat's wife, and I went out to Silverlake and Los Feliz for a goodbye dinner/chilling out. I was feeling like crap (see my recent post) for much of that time, but I'm not going to miss Cat's goodbye dinner for a silly thing like that. I am thinking that for my goodbye dinner there should be large portions of meat and then some gaming, and hopefully the goodbye dinner will even be while I'm still around rather than the night after I leave... :)

WTF department: Wikipedia's "Notability guidlines"

Now, you might be wondering why I am flagging this post with a WTF.

Well, take a look at the page for Wikipedia's notability guidelines.

In particular, take a look at the chart on the right of the page that conatins specific categories for which wikipedia has published notability guidelines. One of them is pornographic actors. Hence, WTF.