If nothing else convinces you that “time” is a man-made, artificial construction meant to keep people from twiddling their thumbs and staring up at the sun, it should be today. Today is February 29th, which, according to our Gregorian calender, is a Leap Day. What’s a Leap Day? Well, our 24-hour day, 365-day a year calender is off kilter because it actually takes the Earth a bit longer than 365 full days to complete an orbit around the sun. So we have to “add-in” an extra day to the calender every four years so that our calender-year actually matches the Earth’s orbital-year.

I think we should just go ahead and have a calender with 365.25-days a year. Wouldn’t that be cool? The last day of the year could be 6 hours long, which would either mean a very short work day, or one helluva drinking binge.

And while we’re on the subject of time, where the hell is our time machine? Science-fiction has promised us one for decades now, and I’m sick of waiting. And flying cars. Wait, a Flying Car Time Machine!! That’s the ticket. Oh, and teleporters. Oooo, and sociopathic, megalomaniacal, sentient computers!

Okay, I could do without the last one. I guess what I’m trying to say is that real science needs to get a clue and start being as interesting as fake science. What would you rather study: the mathematical reason our solar year is slightly fucked up, or the ways to prevent people from inadvertently telefragging each other?

That’s what I thought.

• Nerd Link!—BookletCreator
  “BookletCreator - is a free online tool that allows to create a booklet from a PDF document. It reorders pages so that after printing and folding the pages you get a small book.” I’m saving this more for myself than for your readers. So I’m selfish. Deal

Currently, I’m teaching four classes–two of comp I and two of comp II. At UTSA, comp I is “informative writing” and comp II is “argument.” In the comp I classes my students work on using research as a means to inform their readers. There are several things the students need to keep in my when writing their papers in comp I: summarizing and paraphrasing correctly, using MLA parenthetical citations appropriately, learning to structure an essay competently, etc.

One of the most foreign concepts to the students is the notion of audience. The majority of the students don’t truly realize that at its most basic element, writing is simply a form of communicating with other people. Too often, the students turn in their papers without ever considering the fact that someone might actually read what they wrote. They only think of writing as a means to fulfill an assignment, but I find that if I can break through that intellectual wall and help the students recognize an audience, their writing generally improves exponentially.

Last week the students had to turn in a process analysis paper (fancy term for “how-to” paper). As an author, one of the biggest challenges of this paper is deciding when technical terms need to be defined for the readers. I tell my students to err on the cautious side, and if they have any doubts whether or not a term needs to be defined, they should probably go right ahead and define it.

One of my students turned in a paper where he mentioned the second law of thermodynamics in passing and where he stated, and I’m paraphrasing, that everyone knows that the majority of the electricity we use in our home comes from burned coal.

I kinda know the definition of the second law of thermodynamics, something about entropy increasing in closed systems, but I had no idea about coal and electricity. Just for a moment, I wondered if I was too big of a moron to be reading his paper.

So to make myself feel better I told him that a normal audience would probably need those terms defined.

It remains to be seen if I’m a moron.

I’m not a big believer in the importance of interpreting dreams. I don’t lend any credence or significance to them, and I think dream interpretation books are on par with fortune cookies and magic 8-balls.

That said, I do have pretty cool dreams (Don’t worry, I won’t describe any of them. I always feel like a total d-bag whenever I try to describe a dream, so I usually just don’t talk about them) I also have some pretty scary dreams. I regularly scream myself awake. I also occasionally wake myself up crying. One night, I thought I was fighting a midget. In my dream I was kneeing him in the head. I woke up holding Leigh by the shoulders, kneeing her in the back. Needless to say, she was not at all happy with me.

The other night I woke up suddenly, and in my mind I was repeating the phrase, “In that moment, between now and then.” I was just repeating that over and over in my head: “In that moment, between now and then.” I thought it sounded cool, so I quickly grabbed a pen off my nightstand and wrote it in the front cover of the Steven Pinker book I’m in the middle of reading.

So tonight, out of curiosity, I googled that phrase. And oddly enough, I got one hit. That phrase was also written by the author Kanaan, and the line of text is in a book of erotic poetry titled “Delicate Torture.” Here’s the poem that contains the line.

I’ve never read that book, nor heard of the author, so I know I didn’t unconsciously memorize that line. And I’m not a statistician, but taking into account the number of ways to construct a phrase and the number of words in the English language, and the odds of two people coming up with that exact line must be astronomical.

I have no ending for this, other than to say I was totally disappointed that I think the same way as an erotic poet.

• WTF!
  Google trends provides some…interesting information.

How To Behave On An Internet Forum

I realize that I probably spend entirely too much time watching the Food Network. I’m pretty much an Alton Brown devotee, but I’ll watch whatever piece of shit the Food Network decides to air. Hell, I’ll even leave Ray Ray on as long as it’s not a marathon.

But dammit, I just can’t stand Guy Fieri. The dude is a complete douchebag. I mean, just look at’em:

I suppose I could call his culinary style “fusion,” but only if I’m being nice. If I’m being honest I’d describe his culinary style as “dumbshit cuisine.” Since he doesn’t really know how to make classical dishes, he simply throws a bunch of stuff together and calls it “manly.” His culinary knowledge makes Ray Ray look like Julia Child.

He calls roasted red bell peppers “red bells.” ‘Cause he’s just that cool, ya’ll.

When he has to take his jewelry off to actually touch the food he says he’s going to “de-bling.”

He has the hairstyle a twelve-year old wannabe skateboarder and he shapes his goatee. He also wears his sunglasses on the back of his head, just in case you didn’t see his totally badass tattoos and miss the point that he’s a fucking rebel.

I hope the peroxide that Guy Fieri uses to bleach his stupid, spiky hair soaks through his skull and into his brain, and he slowly goes insane before finally choking to death on a red bell.

One of the last words I’d use to describe myself would be “giddy.” But today, when I checked my mail, I did in fact feel giddy. I hopped up and down with gleeful jubilation. I even shrieked a little. No, it wasn’t because I got the current edition of Entertainment Weekly, which I did, but it was because my copy of A Magician Among the Spirits arrived today. In the 1920’s, after the death of his mother, Harry Houdini set out on a mission to debunk spiritualists, mediums, and other confidence artists who prey on the emotionally vulnerable and recently bereaved. In 1924, he published a book on his personal investigations into the world of Spiritualism.

Until the death of his mother, Houdini had occasionally worked as a medium and a psychic. He viewed the practice as nothing more than performance, as entertainment, and not as a way to seduce or rob the gullible or uneducated. In his introduction he says that after the death of his mother he saw the practice as “border[ing] on crime.” At the end of his introduction Houdini states:

I have spent a goodly part of my life in study and research. During the last thirty years I have read every single piece of literature on the subject of Spiritualism that I could. I have accumulated one of the largest libraries in the world on psychic phenomena, Spiritualism, magic, witchcraft, demonology, evil spirits, etc. some of the material going back as far as 1489, and I doubt if any one in the world has so complete a library on modern Spiritualism, but nothing I have ever read concerning the so-called Spiritualistic phenomena has impressed me as being genuine. It is true that some of the things I read seemed mystifying but I question if they would be were they to be reproduced under different circumstances, under test conditions, and before expert mystifiers and open minded committees. Mine has not been an investigation of a few days or weeks or months but one that has extended over thirty years and in that thirty years I have not found one incident that savoured of the genuine. If there had been any real unalloyed demonstration to work on, one that did not reek of fraud, one that could not be reproduced by earthly powers, then there would be something for a foundation, but up to the present time everything that I have investigated has been the result of deluded brains or those which were too actively and intensely willing to believe.

Obviously Houdini was a legendary magician, but as time goes on his role as a skeptic and a scientist begins to become more important than his role as an entertainer. He eschewed magical thinking, but he didn’t stifle the hope that the supernatural might exist. Houdini just wanted to make sure that in the search for the supernatural we didn’t forget scientific method, skepticism, and critical thinking.

We need more people like Harry Houdini.

• A Time Paradox
  The SS begins to doubt the supremacy of da Fuhrer.

As the race for the presidency continues, the pundits keep slicing the American electorate into neat little groups so that it’s easy for them to reference large groups of people, which truthfully, irritates me more than a little bit. Just listen to the political talk shows and you’ll hear things like “the black vote” or “the latino vote.” Whenever I hear a pundit comment on group of people like that I always wonder why they never say “the white vote.” The fact that they don’t only illustrates the ridiculousness of the whole practice.

I’m sorta glad they don’t use “African-American” or “Asian-American” or “Latino-American.” I can’t stand the habit of hyphenating and combining “American” with whatever nation of origin the culture’s ancestors emigrated from. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind ancestral pride, but combining and hyphenating only illustrates to me that someone is valuing their nation of origin, which they may or may not have ever even seen, over the nation in which he or she holds an actual citizenship.

I suppose the only other answer is to address groups of people as “black” or “white.” But there again, “black” and “white” doesn’t really describe us. I’m not really white; I’m more of a reddish-tan. During the winter months I am, in fact, translucent, but that begins to change around mid-March. And Wesley Snipes notwithstanding, I’ve really never seen a black person. I’ve seen mocha and light brown, but never straight-out black. And even though white and black people aren’t really offended by the terms “black” and “white,” I’m pretty sure Asians and Latinos wouldn’t like to be categorized by a color.

Also, categorizing a whole group of people by color, or even by country of ancestry, makes it seem as if those people are of one mindset, which is a ridiculous proposition. Regardless of what political pundits seem to think, not all black people think alike. Neither do Asians. Or W.A.S.P.s. (Well, the Amish might, but I don’t actually know any of them to check.)

The only answer I can come up with is that everyone in the nation needs to take the same aptitude test. Our answers would get us grouped and cross-referenced into many different categories and sub-categories. That way we’d all know that the label that personally applies to us represents us accurately, instead of simply reducing us to a stereotype for easy reference.

Wouldn’t it be nice to hear a pundit say “Well, Senator Obama is polling well with comic book nerds, but at the same time he’s doing rather poorly with fantasy football dweebs”?