How to eat sushi (wtf department)

Charles Lee '96 passed along this video concerning the proper way to eat sushi. I assume Lemming can watch this without fear of death. The video is a bit long (around 8 min), but the deadpan style is pretty amusing on a few occasions. Anyway, the major reaction to the video is wtf.

D & D scheduling for weekend of 12/23

I am available for any time during the weekend.

Who is even going to be in town?

Do we default to board games? I guess the first thing is to find out who will be around at all. For those people, when are you available?

Monday is fine for gaming too since that's an official holiday. I should get myself an electric menorah because I'm in the mood to play along and light the appropriate candles.

Monkeys Shock the BCS (again)

The BCS can't seem to get the monkeys off of it's back. In particular, there was recently an opinion piece in the Washington Post that discusses some work in which I've been involved (with Thomas Callaghan and Peter Mucha; Thomas was the one who did the real work; Peter and I were advisors on tje project) about using random walkers (on the graph defined by the college football schedule) to rank football teams. The short version is that our random walkers, which we playfully dubbed "monkeys", do just as well as the BCS. The Washington Post article proposes the idea of replaces the experts with monkeys, which is actually kind of reminiscent about how things were jokingly phrased when we first came up with the monkey analogy (which is actually my fault, because I would come up with comments asking whether monkeys can do as well as the experts).

I mentioned this project in an earlier blog entry, but I'm reiterating it because of the Washington Post gig. Our 2005 rankings our available on the official project website, from which our papers can also be downloaded. We've now taken to using the less snide and more accurate term 'random walkers' in our presentations, although the monkeys still get mentioned now and again for fun, especially as we can't exactly escape them at this point. (The official webpage was originally called "Monkeys Shock the BCS" and you know I am the one who wanted to allude to Peter Gabriel.)

There were rumors floating around (which might have just been somebody being nice to us; I only heard this third-hand) that our system was actually considered by the Powers That Be to be added to the official BCS system but that the use of the term 'random monkeys' hurt our chances---hence the change to random walkers. Of course, with the article in the Washington Post, all such chances are probably dead and buried. But maybe we'll get used in the Congressional hearings? That would be pretty cool...

Nomaaaaah is a Dodger!

The Dodgers have signed Nomar Garciaparra to a one-year contract. Nomar, who will play first base for us, has been injury-plagued in recent seasons, but he still can perform well when he's healthy. Now, while Nomar can't be trusted to remain healthy, this is one of those moves that has a very high upside. Because we only signed him to a one-year contract, there also isn't a huge risk involved, so I am very pleased with this move. This could provide a very nice offensive boost.

On another note, I am listening for the first time to the B-side (called "Newborn") from Depeche Mode's single of a "A Pain That I'm Used To", which just got released in the UK and will soon be released in The States. This song is very cool, and I'm always happy to have more new DM songs.

Which House are you in: Harry Potter edition

I received by e-mail a Harry Potter hat-sorting quiz to determine House. Neither of these quizzes is great, but since both put me in the same place (Ravenclaw), I decided I'd go ahead and post them anyway. Given some of the questions, this destination may be a reasonably common one for Techers [except, perhaps, for PageBoys, who I think may have a certain other destination in mind... :) I don't actually believe that, but I like making the comment anyway, and I'm not subject to Rotation Rules at the moment.].

Quiz 1

Quiz 2

Wallace and Gromit (and upcoming film plans)

I saw Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit on the way back from England. It was good but not great. I liked Chicken Run better. There were some nice references in this flick---for example, the King Kong moment and the two howling incidents were greatly appreciated. I noticed a corny Harry Potter reference, and after having spent a week in England, I definitely appreciated the general format of the street layout in this film more than I would have before. There were some nice double entendres in the film, and the 'may contain nuts' joke on the box of cheese was absolutely beautiful. I wonder if I would have liked it better had I seen it in the theatre and when I wasn't really tired and feeling crappy?

I was going to see Sky High in the plane as well, but I messed up my synchronization with the film's start.

There are a number of films in the theatre that I want to see that have come out in the past couple weeks. I'll hopefully start dealing with these on Monday. For example, anybody for Aeon Flux?

Hitting the pubs and a few more thoughts

I made my way over to the Eagle last night. The fish & chips are indeed excellent, although there's actually one place in the world in which I've had better fish & chips. Not that anybody reading this should care about my ranking, but the relevant point is that the place in question is in Santa Monica, CA, so that we should all go there. It's called Ye Olde King's Head, and it's a traditional British pub (modulo the way smoking and ordering works in the US, but you get the idea). On the way there, I noticed a coffee place (that I tried today; it actually can make iced drinks; hooray!) as well as a cafe'/dessert place that's open until 10pm (i.e., something along the lines of what I was trying to find on Monday night). The Eagle has a sign on its front indicating its role in the whole Watson/Crick thing (they apparently went there to drink and discuss their work; very cool!), and I suspect that my current postdoc advisor (Michael Cross) went there as well, given that his College (Corpus Christi) from his undergrad days is right next to this pub (with maybe one other restaurant in between). Apparently, he showed some people his old dorm room at some point during this semester's program.

The other pub I visited was The Castle Inn, although I didn't eat anything, so I didn't get much out of it. (I don't drink, so I have to have another reason to go. The way things worked, seating was an issue, so I also didn't really get a chance to sit around and talk to the people with whom I went.) The pub social atmosphere is certainly pretty cool, but the smoking sucks ass. I really don't like it when my clothes reak of smoke when I leave the place and when I'm around smoking too much I start to feel sick. (That is, not only do I dislike smoking because it smells bad, but it goes beyond my tastes in that I am "visibly" affected.) It's such a shame. I guess I would just have to learn to live with it if I lived here or (more likely) visited here for 6 months to a year as part of some program. (Given the existence of the Isaac Newton Institute, the latter situation is fairly likely to happen at some point in my life.)

Another thought that has nothing to do with this but that I forgot to mention. This comes from a brief conversation on Sunday and I unfortunately don't remember the wording as well as I did before. I also won't say who said this but the quote is basically along the following lines: "Creatism is not a theory because you can't test it. Neither is string theory, really, for the same reason, in fact, but at least the latter becomes a theory asymptotically as time ---> infinity."

Like death pebbles, only larger

On Monday, I was walking between buildings in the Isaac Newton Institute (well, the second building is technically a different mathematical center) and I stepped on some stone walkways and slipped slightly as I was walking. These stones are much larger than the death pebbles and less slippery, but I can see how much of a hazard they might be when slightly wet. Death pebbles (and variants thereof) may look cool, but they have this name for a reason. (Actually, I remember Tilford once slipped on the death pebbles, and the result verified their well-deserved name.)

Soaking up the atmosphere

There are a couple aspects of this.

One is simply walking through the old streets to just see what's up. I had a chance to do this mostly in my Monday evening wanderings, during which I could better appreciate the cool atmosphere and learn how difficult it can be to navigate streets that aren't arrayed via the x- and y-axes and whose names change at almost every intersection. (Of course, I really wish there were more coffee and dessert places, especially ones open late. That's a part of my daily life that I really like---just to sit down in a cafe and read or even do work.) Walking through St. John's College also revealed very cool architecture. I haven't gone into any of the other Colleges yet, but we have our conference banquet in Trinity Hall tonight, so at least I'll get to add one more. (We have no breaks during the day unless one skips talks, so I won't be walking through the other Colleges on this trip.)

The other aspect is the incredibly long, rich tradition of applied mathematics at Cambridge. Just to say I was here where so many of the pioneering studies in the foundations of my own discipline were made is awesome. There is an extent to which one can get this at some of the best US universities, but here the difference is not just in the brightness of the achievements but also in the sheer quantity and breadth of them over a very long time (and of course, the really old school ones). The applied mathematicians lised on the Cambridge website are Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Babbage, Stokes, Larmor, Rayleigh, Eddington, Dirac, GI Taylor, Sir Harold Jeffreys Sir James Lighthill, and Stephen Hawking. That's really an incredible list of names. And unlike in the US system, England is full of departments of applied mathematics and theoretical physics (and others similarly titled) reflecting the concomitant nature of research in these areas that people of my academic stripe stress.

Incidents from my sleep-deprived first day

For one thing, I thought I saw a glimpse of Stonehenge through the fog as the bus was driving from London to Cambridge. I didn't get a chance to look this up so I mentioned this to somebody and I was told that couldn't be right. It did, however, look like a mini version of that (through the fog), so one question is what I saw there.

There were talks on the first day in commemoration of a well-known pattern formation person who died in March. Most of these talks included personal reminiscences and had some cool historical stuff, and the fact that some of the content was lighter helped me given my lack of sleep, long day of travel, and continued suffering from the flu. (This is a really bad combination, by the way.)

Several of the people at that (and at the rest of the conference) know me, and one or two who I only met once or twice actually remember me [beyond the looks familiar stage], which is good. We went into town for lunch before the first talk and I knew I wouldn't be late because the first speaker was among those going. There was another really big name and two other prominent researchers who are still reasonably young [maybe early-mid 40s] and me. (As usual, there's a which name doesn't belong joke in here somewhere.) We walked through St. John's college to get to St. John's Street on the other side. (Strictly speaking, non-members aren't allowed to enter through the back as we did, but it's the fastest way to get to the central part of town and all the gates are unlocked during the day.) We chose to go left (it seemed to have more restaurants) and went to the first place we found, which was a sandwich/pastry/coffee place. They have a very cool way of doing sandwiches (choose what you want on it every step of the way) and good prices. The people working at the place at that point were two girls who I think were Scandinavian of some sort based on the accents. My ordering was quite incoherent because of my state, and my brief attempt to explain what an iced capuccino was didn't work (I expected an issue here because of my experiences in Australia), so I ending up getting the hot version (though it was decent). (If I weren't so tired and didn't want to keep others waiting, I probably would have tried further.) I ended up being the brunt of good-natured ribbing by the girl helping me as a result of all this (there was a brief threat of adding tons of sugar packets to my capuccino, but I got my requested number of two---I had visions of old iced "teas" that had more half & half than tea), which was highly unexpected after she had dealt with the others pretty coldly. I think it's sometimes good to be the young person amidst all the geezers. There's some sort of relativism involved. For now, the story ends there, but I still have a couple days to go to the place again.

Dwarves of England

This is perhaps the song Warren Zevon would have written if he didn't like lyncanthropes so much. (If you don't know this reference, there is some music to which you really need to listen...)

I'm actually talking about two specific people, although the impression I have based on things I've read and heard in the past is that this is a well-propagated stereotype of some of the blue collar folk here (i.e, no claims of actual knowledge---just that I had heard about this). Also, I have only noticed it in these two people and not in others, so it could easily just be because they're old and bitter.

Anyway, take your dwarf stereotype and that's what these two people seemed to be like---all gruff and ornery and stuff. The bus driver screamed at an old customer "Do you think I'm psychic?!?" regarding a confusion about ticket prices, which are lower for people who are older. (The women's mannerisms---especially the way she phrased her queries---were admittedly annoying, but I don't think they came close to the scream-in-the-customer's face level.) The guy also complained about possibly having to go home late as a result of the delay of maybe like 1--2 minutes that she caused.

The other dwarf is one of the porters where I#m staying. I am in Wolfson Court, which is a low-quality dorm (with low-quality food, low-quality plumbing and heating, etc.) near the Isaac Newton Institute just to the west of the St. John's College rugby field (which is just to the west of the College). There are some cool architectural features of the dorm, including the switching between inside and outside within the confines of the building. This leads to lots of extra doors between different areas in addition to the metric ton of fire doors that are present. Many of these doors---especially the ones between inside parts and outside parts---get locked at night. Anyway, there are call buttons on them to reach the porter in case one gets locked out of where one wants to go. One issue that I didn't realize was that some of the doors are sticky, so that some effort can be required to open them (although I only noticed this on Sunday, so something had to have gotten changed since then). The first time I couldn't open one of those doors, I was thinking that it was because the door was locked---I put a reasonable ammount of effort and it didn't seem to do anything. I thus called the porter. First, he wasn't in his office, so I waiteda couple minutes and called again. His answer was to yell at me to just jiggle the door and it would work. It was the right solution, but it's not like I was supposed to know in advance that the door needed that. Apparently, he expected that I did have to know. He must have been annoyed that I interrupted his Solitaire game on Windows, because every time I went by the office, that's what he seemed to be doing. (i.e., not only do I think my question was reasonable but chances are good that I didn't actually interrupt other work)

As usual, this post was longer than I wanted, but there you have it. The dwarves we know and love seem to exist in the form of some (or at least two) old, crotchedly, British men.

Getting to Cambridge

Let's start with the marathon trip.

I stupidly got an early flight, so I set my alarm at 3:45 am and started my day then. All the other Supershuttle people were Techers (one technically didn't have to be but probably was) of some form or another---not a particular surprise for the morning after finals. LAX (or at least the American Airlines terminal) had long waits and I couldn't print out my own tickets because of the international component of the flight, so the longer line was my destination.

I flew to Boston, where I had a 3.5 hour layover for my next flight. In principle, I could have tried to find a later LA flight to Boston when choosing flights initially, but I'm guessing this was somehow cheaper. (I don't remember at this point.) Of course, the extra time gave me a chance to eat solid food (which I had done sparingly for 3-4 days) and to recharge my iPod. (Normally, the recharging wouldn't be necessary and I also brought my old iPod as a back-up for the long journey just in case.) I read a little bit, hacked out a few more lungs (real life once again imitating D & D, damnit) and am now almost done with Promise of the Witch-King. The movie they showed on the first flight was A Shot in the Dark, which is the 2nd Pink Panther film. However, I own it and had seen it relatively recently (maybe 1.5 years ago) and wasn't in the mood for it. Definitely a solid choice, but it didn't work under the circumstance. I was also going to check out some Depeche Mode videos on computer, but the download that made things work a little bit hadn't finished the job. I was going to ask Lemming for help on that, but then I got really sick and this was one of the things that had to go by the wayside for the present. Anyway, I listened to a lot of music during my travels.

On the second flight, I was asked to change seats because the guy next to me was so large that he was creating a fire hazard in the aisle. I moved to an aisle seat. I normally prefer window ones, but aisle definitely beats window + second-hand obesity. The second flight had an in-seat TV, but the interesting movies are all for the way back. (I'll be seeing Wallacwe and Gromit, which I inadvertently missed [or maybe it's still playing], as well as Sky High, which isn't too exciting but which seems interesting and got a lot of praise.) Most of the movies were Christmas movies because, you know, people actually want to see Elf again. There exist Christmas movies I want to see (like The Ice Harvest, which I probably need to do soon), but the ones they were showing weren't among that list. And why is it that just because it's December, that for the entire month about 2/3 of the music stations and movies on the airplane have to be Christmas music/movies? I understand having a dedicated Christmas channel, but this is ridiculous. Somebody must like this, but I haven't met too many people who do.

As we were landing, we had a spectacular view of a HUGE fire (while it was still dark outside, so while I don't want to be callous, this thing looked amazingly cool as a result) that apparently arose from some sort of explosion in an oil warehouse. In looking out the window, one could see an enormous ball (well, not quite ball-shaped) of red orange contrasting sharply against the dark background and amidst must smaller dots from various lights. I suspect this explosion/fire may have made the US news because it looked like something of a pretty large magnitude. (Note: I recognize the seriousness of disasters like this and certainly don't root for them, but I also have to be honest with myself and not ignore the fact that it still looked extremely cool from the airplane. As a postscript, on looking at google news, this apparently is not just in the news but a historically large fire.)

The bus from London to Cambridge was a shorter ride than it was supposed to be because there weren't that many people on it and nobody needed any of the intermediate stops. It was still over 1.5 hours, but I was really feeling crappy and grateful to be done a bit early. The bus driver was one of two dwarfs (by personality, not by stature) I met yesterday, and I'll have a separate entry on this phenomenon later. During the bus ride, I heard that Richard Pryor had died. I plan to have an entry on that after all the Cambridge stuff.

The bus arrived at the bus station in Cambridge, and then I took a cab to Wolfson Court. The nearby campus is St. John's College (for Gazebo's benefit, as he'll know where I am in the city).

I'll have some more later. I need to mention stuff about the living facilities and an incident at a coffee/sandwhich shop.



I arrived at Heathrow and then took a bus to Cambridge.

D & D scheduling for weekend of 12/16

Hellow from England---in fact from the Gordron and Betty Moore Library in the Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Considering that my current job is also from the Moore Foundation, has anything really changed? (Actually, this keyboard has a slightly annoying layout at the peripherhy, so I am fighting typos much more than usual.)

Anyway, my return flight is on 12/17 and while I will be back in Pasadena on Saturday 12/17 due to the magic of time zone changes, I will also not be able to play on 12/17 because I'll feel like total crap. I'm not convinced I'll be that great on 12/18, but I'll be up for trying to play that day. I think the main thing to read into this is that while Sunday 12/18 is the day I can play, if others can't make it that day, then it's also ok to NPC me and play on Friday or Saturday.

Finally, my internet access is daytime-only, so my response time for the thread may sometimes me suboptimal.

What happens in Cambridge stays in Cambridge (UK edition)

I am up obscenely early (pain!) for a flight to Boston, followed by a 3.5 hour layover at Logan, a flight to London-Heathrow, and a roughly 3-hour bus ride to Cambridge, where I'll be staying in Wolfson Court for a pattern formation conference. This is my first trip to jolly old (bloody) England and, in fact, to any part of Europe.

Amusing fake response to referee report

From the Gazebo's blog comes this amusing but fake response to a series of referee reports.

Naturally, I have plenty of my own refereeing stories, mostly from the author's perspective (like when they complained about our not ever mentioning something, to which our response was on the order of 'see equation (1); this is what the whole paper is about'---in this example, all the referee's comments suggested he/she never read the paper, so we added a couple new calculations to the paper rather than resubmit the same thing and specifically requested a different referee and explained why we felt the referee wasn't in good faith; the editor agreed with us, by the way) but with one from the referee's perspective. The one time I refereed something with incident, the authors decided to completely ignore my comments and yell at me and indicate how I obviously knew nothing about [fill in a couple things]. In making those arguments however, they made multiple serious mistakes in their "explanations" in their cover letter of why I was wrong, so I included some very specific page numbers (including in one of the main book sources they were citing) in my second response to help them see the light. Thankfully, the paper ended up in PRB rather than PRL, and I can likely be "blamed" for that.

Botched fort save

My character in Joe's game had already suffered through a disastrous series of botched saves on Sunday---3 in one minute (apparently, Lucky Boy refers to bad luck because it was right after we got food from there); I believe 2 were on my search checks and 1 was on a reflex save for a trap I found after previously just failing the search save. (This did wonders for both my character's Con and his confidence, let me tell you.)

Of course, to make things more realistic, apparently I was also supposed to experience a reduced Con and Str in real life. I had been sick with the flu since Saturday but I had been getting better until I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night on Wed-Thurs (really, some time early Thurs morning) in cold sweats with uncontrollable shakes. (Other, equally unpleasant and more graphic, details will remain unmentioned in the interest of anybody reading this.) It was one of those things that made me know that I wasn't going to do any work yesterday. I usually try to get some work done even when I'm sick, although my productivity this week had already been notably lower for this very reason. I did go to campus briefly to print some stuff out (I don't have a printer at home), but it was a struggle to walk to campus, and thankfully the condensed matter secretary very kindly gave me a ride home in the middle of the work day because of how poorly I was doing. (Before I got around to printing, I lay sprawled on my office floor for an hour. I would have done this on the couches in the building's reception area, but public sleeping in Sloan Annex seems a bit less acceptable than public sleeping in Lloyd.)

Once I got home, I basically slept (or at least lay in bed) until this morning, with very slight breaks to try to get some stuff down (hooray for apple juice!). I did check e-mail a couple times but I didn't even go on espn yesterday to check for baseball trades until like 8pm or something. I would estimate that my Con and Str yesterday were both around 2 (not more than 2!), and as Lemming mentioned, the way ability damage heals that should make me back to normal in 2-3 days. That's a bit of an exaggeration (because I think my modifier is actually only a -1 for each; or perhaps a -2 with a value of 7), but I nevertheless appreciated the comment.

Anyway, yesterday was not the most enjoyable day of my life. People who didn't see me yesterday were telling me how bad I look today. Those who saw me yesterday told me today that I looked much better today.

Oh, and for what it's worth, I made all my reflex saves over the last couple days, thus avoiding the need to clean certain parts of my house.

A busy baseball offseason

Baseball's Winter Meetings are currently in progress. This offseason (and especially these last few days!) has been the busiest one in terms of trade volume in recent memory. A big chunk of the reason is that the free agent class is one of the weakest in recent memory. (This has also led to seriously inflated prices and contract lengths for the few reasonable names out there. For a few notable examples, take a look at how much money Rafael Furcal, BJ Ryan, and AJ Burnett received. The contracts the good free agent pitchers have gotten harken back to the what Darren Dreifort and Chan Ho Park got back in the day in contracts that the teams who signed them came to regret deeply.) Other things seem to have fallen into place as well.

One of the things we've seen is an entire revamping of the NL East. The Marlins have been completely gutted, the Braves have experienced several personnel changes in recent days, and the Mets are much stronger than they were before. (Florida did get some good young players, though, so in 2-3 years, they may be really good if things turn out well.) The Nationals just made a blockbuster deal (getting Alfonso Soriano from Texas, assuming everybody passes their physicals), but I actually think it's a bad trade for them. In the AL East, The Blue Jays have strengthened themselves a lot, although I still think they'll eventually regret some of the contracts they've given out.

All this trade talk is really exciting, as the Winter Meetings had mostly been free agent singing sprees in recent years, and trade speculation represents a higher level of fun than free agent speculation.

It's also distracted me from work a bit this week, but so has the flu.

Navier-Stokes in 3D

It's not exactly the Nature Trail to Hell (also in 3D), but this is pretty important mathematically. Today I saw a talk from Yakov Sinai, one of the preeminent living mathematicians in dynamical systems and mathematical physics, on his work on blow-up of solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations in three-dimensional Euclidean space. A sufficiently complete solution (actually phrased as "substantial progress" on the official website) to existence and uniqueness of Navier-Stokes in 3D is worth $1 million from the Clay Mathematics Institute, as this is one of the millenimum prize problems.

Here is what is written on the website:

"Waves follow our boat as we meander across the lake, and turbulent air currents follow our flight in a modern jet. Mathematicians and physicists believe that an explanation for and the prediction of both the breeze and the turbulence can be found through an understanding of solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations. Although these equations were written down in the 19th Century, our understanding of them remains minimal. The challenge is to make substantial progress toward a mathematical theory which will unlock the secrets hidden in the Navier-Stokes equations."


The Navier-Stokes equations are partial differential equations describing fluids*, and its existence/uniqueness issues become much more difficult in 3D than in 2D. (The 2D version of this millenium problem is solved, although that's not to say there aren't still tons of things to learn about the 2D system... This basically results from there being an inequality in the 2D case whose validity doesn't carry over to 3D.). The prize can be awarded either for an existence/uniqueness theorem or for a result about lack of existence/uniqueness. (For the precise description of the problem, go here. Today's speaker was discussing solutions that blow up (become infinite) in finite time. If I read him correctly, he seems to think he's on the right track for the millenium problem prize, although that's quite a grandiose claim if that's what he actually meant. Given all the stuff he's accomplished in his career (and the fact that he's now in his early 70s), it certainly is reasonable for him to tackle such a problem. It's not like he has to work on shorter-term projects, so he might as well go for the gold. Understanding these issues would aid in the understanding of turbulent dynamics, although putting on my applied hat, we need to know the dynamics of the solutions and not just their blow-up properties. (The prize is for a pure math problem, but engineers using the Navier-Stokes equations to study turbulence are going to be interested in much different things.)

Also, my postdoc advisor at Georgia Tech (Leonid Bunimovich) was a Ph.D. student of Sinai's. (These are the two main people with mathematical billiards named after them.)


* For a typical fluid mechanics problems, one will start with Navier-Stokes and then go to a simpler equation appropriate in the regime of interest and then one will study the "simpler" equation, which usually itself isn't so simple. Also, there are studies of fluids from a statistical mechanics perspective, etc. Anyway, I'm not a fluid mechanist, and I'm not trying to be precise about things here.

New Dodger manager (finally)

The Dodgers have named former Red Sox manager Grady Little to be their new skipper. Personally, I would rather have kept Jim Tracy, but I think this is a reasonable choice. I'm not ecstatic about it, but at least the Dodgers didn't give me another reason to rant and rave. (Ranting and raving has been the order of the last couple days. I haven't been having much fun lately.)

A day at home (and 'waking up in Dental Wonderland')

There's going to be a lot of ranting here. Whenever I visit my parents' house, I always come away really pissed off (usually for multiple reasons). I need to learn my lesson and not go there anymore. It never really was my home the first time around, and it's especially not my home now. (There's a small part at the end after all the ranting.)

\begin{rant}

I slept at my parents' house last night for the first time since October 2004 to add to the convenience of seeing our family dentist this morning. (I thankfully didn't have any cavities---it's not like I have many teeth left that don't already have fillings!---and I last had a check-up a year and a half ago. I normally have check-ups every 6 months and was aware that I had skipped one. I hadn't realized I had actually skipped two, but thankfully I didn't screw myself over as a result. One of my friends recently had his first check-up in five years, and it looks like the inside of his mouth really is a Dental Wonderland, especially when the dentist gets to cash the check he's going to receive...)

My parents got a dog since I was last home. I knew about it but hadn't previously met it. I'm not particularly fond of animals (or people, really, but that's another story). My general opinion is that I want them to leave me alone. I won't drop-kick/punt them unless they bother me. (I've never actually drop-kicked or punted any animals, as my actions are typically much kinder than my comments.) The dog, named "Yoda", is a chihuahua, and is large for it's kind (that's a relative term of course). The name is cool, but sadly the dog didn't listen when I informed it that I was not the one it was looking for. (I need to work harder on my Jedi powers... either that, or I need to carry a light-saber around with me.) I was told it hates just about everybody (and that I should apparently get along with it as a result), and sure enough I go home and this thing comes up to me and barks madly and attempts to attack a couple times. (I was also warned the dog french-kisses people it likes, so clearly this battle can't be won.) I also found out that Yoda has apparently completed messed up one of my old stuffed animals (although I never actually saw what it currently looks like) which annoys me greatly, because I really like these particular remnants of childhood. I found out later that he's reached at least a couple of my other stuffed animals (although their bruises are much more minor---the fur on part of one isn't as smooth as it used to be, for example---when he followed my Mom into my old room. My parents give the dog the run of the house, but the old room that I shared with my sister was declared off limits after the dog went for the animals in there. I slept in there last night because apparently that's the only way to not have the dog share one's bed at some point during the night. In punishment, Yoda scratched and whined outside the door (you know, because of the enemy sleeping inside) for a long time, which made reading pretty hard. I didn't sleep well either (I love waking up in cold sweats! Those are the best nights!), but that's mostly because I have the flu right now. (The dog was apparently asleep.) Naturally, this means I wasn't in the best of moods even from the start. Whenever I would try to do something outside the door, I had to deal with the dog coming in to bark at me (and jump and bark at me) and he had to be restrained on several occasions (partly, I imagine, to prevent a promised drop-kick). I don't do well when I want to be left alone and I am not left alone. I get so stressed out when that happens, regardless of whether the thing doing it is something that can understand or something that can't. The resulting stress is there in both cases. The way I'm feeling right now, I don't want to go back to my parents' house unless the dog isn't there because I'm not going to have even a moment's peace if I do. (Not that I get much peace when I'm there anyway, but this just makes a bad problem even worse.) I also saw a couple paw prints amidst the dust on my Civil War chess set, which was actually pretty expensive when I got it back in the day. I didn't look carefully to see the scratches that I assume are now there, but this whole thing is just a nightmare for me. (Note, by the way, the references to Black & White and (especially!) Anchorman in this paragraph.)

In the morning, I noticed that a bunch of my stuff had been moved. This was stuff I had been asked to go through in years past, so this included, e.g., the old issues of The Tech that I wanted to keep (with copies of some of my articles, including several that I don't have saved by any electronic means) and many of the birthday cards from over the years that I had been keeping. Anyway, the point is that basically all of this stuff were things I was specifically keeping---not just a pile of random things I hadn't gone through where I would only want to keep some subset of it. Supposedly, my father put it into a box (he insists he didn't throw it away, but he's said that before concerning things he has ended up throwing away), which can potentially be ok except by parents' house is so messy that my chances of finding it in the next several years are remote. I doubt he labeled the box; it would constitute a never-before-seen phenomenon if he had. I'm unhappy enough about the stuff being boxed without there being a discussion (there is currently nothing in the place where it was before), although this isn't any sort of issue of rights because its my parents house and they can do what they want. However, I specifically keep stuff in very specific spots so that I know exactly where they are when I want to look through them, and I really get annoyed (and have historically gotten very annoyed) when my stuff gets moved without my being given knowledge of where the bloody thing was moved. (Naturally, another thing that soon has happened is that the mover forgets where he/she put the stuff.) The primary purpose of the discussion above would be so I can actually know where it is. Ugh. Anyway, it's not that this is unfair because it really isn't but it is something that pisses me off greatly and it's something that I have told my parents pisses me off greatly, so the main possibilities are that they are really, really dense (which is possible, as that can run in the family) or they don't care that it pisses me (or they want to piss me off, but I think don't care is far more likely). It's most likely denseness.

Of course, when my stuff is moved (and lost, with long transients) or the dog violates my stuff in some manner, I just find out gradually through questions or what I find. There is of course the stuff I haven't figured out yet because historically nobody ever just volunteers any of this information. So in contrast to the issue above about dealing with the dog, there is the matter of coming back to attempt to maximize the fidelity of my stuff and find some of the stuff that's now in random spots.

Eventually, I will have a more permanent job and perhaps a bigger apartment, and I have long-term plans to get my stuff out of my parents' place so that I can preserve it better because they simply can't be trusted. The dog having the run of the house also contributes here.

I can't really claim that any of this is unfair or that I am in the right in any sort of way here. I can just indicate how pissed off I am about all this without claiming that my feelings are justified according to any reasonable definition of the word. I hate it passionately when somebody fucks with the stuff that I treasure, whether that somebody in question is a dog or a person. The sooner I am in a better position to get my stuff out of there, the better. (Just unearthing it from all the junk in my parents' place is going to take a huge effort. To paraphrase George Carlin, "Move your shit! I don't have room for my stuff."

\end{rant}

There are also a couple random things from earlier today. After my dental appointment, I went to lunch with my mother at the Pasadena location of Houston's, where I hadn't eaten since I was an undergrad. The waiting staff were all wearing all black, so I think they're all actually ninjas. The dojo must be hidden somewhere behind the kitchen... I also found out (or was reminded) that someone my family (including me, for once) has known for a long time has been the manager at Aardvark's in Pasadena for around 10 years. My first thought was to be extremely glad that I wasn't among the purchasers when certain things (including ones pertaining to Bob Barker, I believe) were bought for certain Airband skits...