They're creepy and they're crawly

I went to see the last Mariners game of the season today, and they played all the usual baseball tunes: the CHARGE ditty, take me out to the ball game, the star spangled banner, call to post, the Addams Family theme...

And it made me wonder, how'd the Addams family theme become such a baseball staple? Who thought, let's change the snaps into claps and it'd be perfect?

I don't like evangelicals.

I think we should start calling Islamic terrorists Islamic evangelicals. Osama Bin Laden is their chief (tape-delayed) televangelist and suicide bombers are aerovangelists.

I'm losing my edge.

I dislike people who decry gentrification. People who say this would never live in a place that wasn't at least partially gentrified. It is exactly the same as people who don't like it when their favorite indie band has gotten too famous. A friend was complaining about condos recently, and I have no sympathy. People complain about the lack of neighborhood, and I have no sympathy for that either, because these people walk around with their cellphones glued to their face. But even disregarding that, I don't see anything wrong with it. When I lived in Central Square (which was great because it was like this gentrification process that got stuck and you have homeless people hanging out harmlessly outside the Gap) there were "locals" who sat around on their stoop all day chatting with each other, whom I walked past when I left for class, and were still there five hours later when I got back, and if this was what the kids like to pretend is now missing in their gentrified neighborhoods, then they are crazy because all I could think was why can't they do something productive with their time.


But I was there!

Phrases I enjoy.

I really hope I get to say "Unhand me!" at some point in my life. I like to envision scenarios in which I may get to say this, say, when I accidentally stumble into a whore house and am mistaken for a regular patron.

The PAT.

When Democrats talk about how Sarah Palin is unqualified to be vice-president (and therefore president) because she's only been mayor of a small town and governor of Alaska for a couple years, Republicans correctly point out that Barack Obama has been a senator for only a short period of time.

What the Democrats really want to say is that Palin isn't educated, or learned, enough to be president. (Though I don't doubt she's a pretty smart lady.)

I think what we need is the PAT, the Presidential Aptitude Test, administered by the Educational Testing Service, with an array of multiple choice questions, and a high score of 1600. (Or should it go to 2400? I'm old, I don't know how standardized testing scoring works anymore.)

Just as Harvard wouldn't accept* a student who scores 500 on the SAT, nor should the American people accept a president who scores a 500 on the PAT.

Here is a sample page of such a test:


These are really easy questions. These should be the giveaways at the very beginning of the test, with questions becoming increasingly difficult. Frankly, most Americans who give a shit should be able to answer at least these eight questions. Still, if you had to bet against one of the four presidential/vice-presidential candidates...

* Harvard sometimes makes nepotistic exceptions for, say, the son of the institution's former president. The American people, on the other hand, are far more uncompromising.

Canada, with pictures

I went to Canada with my parents:


We saw mountains, lakes, and glaciers:




Then I came home and the economy was dead.

glaciers and shit

I am going to Canadia for a week. Be back with pictures.

On the move..

I am moving again for the seventh time in five years, but only six blocks away. This time I am running away from a crazy roommate. It is possible that I am flighty.

My father is a poet

date Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 11:46 AM
subject Happy Birthday

Hi! Andy,

This morning, I whispered my greeting in my head, hoping that the electronic field, the light, the wind and any other super-natural power will deliver instantly to you my best wishes and sincere thoughtfulness.

Happy Birthday to You. All the Best.

Love,
Dad

I have become very lax in my blogging. Alas.

Yesterday I was thinking that working 9-5 should really mean leaving the house at 9 and getting back at 5. I should attempt to convince my employers of this new definition.

In the past few months, I spent a lot of money trying to buy happiness. I purposely did this to test the old adage. Turns out you really can't buy happiness. Or at least I didn't. Photography equipment, video cameras, scooters, clothing, and expensive food didn't work. But maybe I was just buying the wrong things and should have been spending my money on prostitutes.

But I guess almost all my happiness and depressions have nothing to do with money. The only purchased thing in my life that really made me happy was my car. And crashing it was the only really truly depressing thing that was caused by a material good. (I am still in mourning, and in year eight of my self-imposed vow to not have a car for ten years.) But then I guess the car had nothing to do with it. The car just represented the only time in my life I got what I wanted.

Big, Bigger, Biggest

At the corner coffeeshop, coffee drinks come in three sizes: Short, Tall, and Grande, in increasing size.

Short is smaller than Tall. This makes perfect sense. But why is Tall smaller than Grande? Tall means big. Grande means big. Is an Italian big bigger than an English one? I think they should take the idea further, and just use the word for "large" in all different languages, and distinguish between them based on the average size of that country's people. So Okii (Japanese) would be smaller than Big (British accent) would be smaller than Big (American southern accent).

Bad business strategies

"Hey, we've got extra-large!"

I have a friend.

I had a visitor this weekend, the first one not named Cathy Lin:



I'm not the best tour guide, but we scooted around Seattle and that is pretty much fun no matter what.

true multitasking.

When I go for a run, I usually listen to whatever is randomly populated in my ipod shuffle by itunes. I never skip any songs because I have something like 400 GB of music and have probably only listened to half of them, and I am trying to listen to more of it.

Quite accidentally, yesterday as I ran, a track came up that began: "Chapter 9: The Arrow of Time." I thought this was some sci-fi nerdy hiphop track intro, and as the monotone voice spoke, I kept expecting some bass and beats to kick in. In fact, I thought it was the Deltron 3030 album, which by the way is great, and has just such intros and lyrics, including lines like: "Perusing my 21st century classic comics, the fun is astronomic / I figured since I'm here I'll renew my galactic passport / So I'm not persecuted by no galactic assholes." Honestly, the album is really good.

But anyway, the voice kept going and 30 minutes later, I realized it was an electronic book and when I got home, I plugged my ipod in to see that it was Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. (Sadly, it is not read by Dr. Hawking himself.)

And it occurred to me that audio books are the perfect running material, theoretical physics or not. I really felt like I was multitasking. Now I have eliminated the whole, "I have too much to do, no time to run" excuse for not running. Also, in my recent attempt to rein in my myriad of projects, of which there were too many, I crossed off "reading" as something I had time to do. But now I get to put it back, and I should be able to finish A Brief History of Time in no time at all.

beep beep

I got a:



I am busy scooting!

Ohhhh, we're halfway there.

The half-marathon is a good running distance saddled with a really terrible name. I think it is unpopular solely because of its name. No one wants to do a half anything: it sounds like it's for people with half the energy, half the will power, half the talent; it's a race for half the person. They don't call the 5k a half-10k. They don't call an EP a half-album, a B cup a half-D, the WNBA the half-NBA.

So with that in mind, I will fix the ill-named half-marathon. The marathon is supposedly (but not really) the distance the Greek messenger Pheidippides ran from Marathon to Athens to tell the Senate that they'd defeated the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. Consulting a map, it looks like the town of Nea Erythrea is about halfway between Athens and Marathon. And so I declare the half-marathon dead, the 21,097.5-meter race to be henceforth referred to only by its new name, the Nea Erythrea. Catchy!

Speaking of which, I think I'm going to run the Portland Marathon this year. Nea Erythreas are for wimps.

Bill Clinton made me poor!

I had a pretty indistinct upper-middle class upbringing: there was always food on the table, I got most of what I wanted; I never thought about finances, that we had too much money or too little. At Stuyvesant High School, they groom impressionable young kids to become Wall Street lackies, doctors, engineers, and grown-up rich kids. It seemed pretty clear that if you followed a six-point algorithmic agenda, you would enjoy monetary success in the future, and, by being kept busy with an inundation of schoolwork, there was no time to question any of it. So when I went to college during America's economic heyday, I was presented with a few choices. In my senior year, I could take three more classes and finish a computer science major, take four more classes and finish an economics major, or take three classes and finish an English major. I figured I could do either of the first two and make good money when I was done or I could do the latter and still do all right. How that Bill Clinton economy tricked me! Little did I know the economic boom would die and now I sort of muddle along middlingly in the current economic clime. Alas! It occurs to me that had I grown up in a lower/lower-middle class upbringing, I might have kept a more careful eye on the monetary bottom line of my college decisions because of an omnipresent awareness of financial prudence and responsibility. Maybe there is a swap of the lower-middle class and upper-middle class during a time of economic shrinkage directly following a time of economic prosperity.

Well! I blame all the commencement speakers who say "Do what your heart tells you." Bastards! Commencement speakers are that point one percent that defied odds to achieve success. That's why they're commencement speakers. Clearly they are not statisticians or jilted romantics: they don't know that the heart mostly leads you astray.

232 years old tomorrow.

I was planning on updating this blog a lot more, but then the weather got really nice so I got lazy and hung outside instead. But I will try to persevere from now, and take an hour every day while at work to write an entry here. Of course, I've said this before so I am probably lying.

Here, a picture of Chloe Lin:



Chloe isn't really my dog. and her name isn't really Chloe Lin. But I was dogsitting last month and I am a bad dogsitter so I dropped Chloe and took her to the vet to make sure she was fine (she was.) When I got there, I filled out the form as though I were the owner. When I got the bill, it said: Chloe Lin. So now I call her Chloe Lin. (But I say it like Chloe Lynn, as though she were Southern.) Also, I filled out "Andy Lin" for my name, and yet on the bill they'd changed it to Andrew Lin. ?

My name is...

Usually, but not always, I can tell how much someone likes me based on what they call me. If they call me "Andy," then either I have just met them, or they are fond of me and are good friends. If they call me "Andy Lin," then they harbor secret ill-will towards me or are merely an acquaintance or are angry at me. If they call me "Lin" then they are racist. If they call me "Guh," then they are my sister and like me the most.

Global warming and the law of averages

It's been, by all accounts, a spring in Seattle that has been colder and wetter than usual. Last year, I am told, it was unusually warm. The year before that, in Boston, it was an exceptionally hot summer having just followed an unseasonably cold winter.

It is inevitable that I will one day experience weather that is perfectly average. I will greet my neighbor and say, "My, this is exactly the climate I was expecting." And she'll say, "Yes, Andy. Do you have something else to complain about?" "Of course."