I'm nearly out of things to say

This blog is undergoing a planned demolition on Saturday, but today I learned to prove the following:

If you take any two numbers on the real number line - any two numbers at all - there will always be both a rational and an irrational number between them.

It's been a while since I found math beautiful.

Use your words

"When you're getting into sort of very heated ideological debates like that, it's going to get heated."

-McGill Tribune

RIP Toxie

When I was growing up, NPR was the only radio station that my parents listened to. Eventually I quietly rebelled and struck out to expand my horizons by listening to 88.5, the UPenn college radio, but Planet Money, All Things Considered, and CarTalk were the background to many cooking sessions in my kitchen.

So I was saddened greatly to hear that NPR's pet toxic asset, Toxie, died on Friday.

Hats off and a moment of silence.

Weekend Not Retrospective - very much right now, but suppressed

The Talking Heads make me want to run ten miles at sixminute mile pace wearing hot pink spandex and then punch someone not out of dislike or illwill but out of sheer joy at being alive:




I'm in a library writing proofs, I don't own any pink spandex and I can't run at sixminute mile pace for very long anymore, so that may have to be postponed for the time being.

On this day in 1934...

My anarchist student planner (very similar to a regular student planner except for its endorsement of views which range from vaguely leftist to absolutely extreme and an apparent inability to spell the word its) reminded me today that it's Leonard Cohen's birthday. Living in Montreal, I have acquaintances who claim to have seen him walking his dog in the park and go to a school whose Daily newspaper he used to write for. Like every female from the age of fifteen I've had my Cohen phase and still think he's rather a sexpot.

So happy birthday:


Grooveshark also has a Regina Spektor cover of the same song which may have the rare quality of being even better than the original.

Sidenote: Regina Spektor has long been one of my feminine vices. During freshman year, a friend and I discovered that one of the most intense and intimidating men we knew also liked her. The information was a bit like Christmas come early while serving as affirmation that even people who run on motor oil have souls.

I just noticed this

I live on the border of the city of Montreal and the rich, white, very anglophone enclave of Westmount, a city within a city that defected from Montreal after refusing to pay poor people's taxes for things like public transit. Today I noticed that the main artery Boulevard René Levesque (named after the founder of the Parti Québecois, a Canadian political party whose main platform is to defect from Canada), becomes Boulevard Dorchester (possibly the most Anglo-Saxon name I can think of short of Nottinghamshire) upon entering Westmount. Apparently white anglos can't stomach him. I don't know nearly enough about the controversial figure of Monsieur Levesque or his politics to pass judgement, but I do know the following fun fact: He once ran over a guy lying in the street and the policeman fined him $25 for not wearing his glasses.

WR: Muzeum

Jaromir Nohavica is a prolific Czech folk songwriter who provided the background to all car trips in my youth, before we switched to Deep Purple. In elementary school, I knew dozens of his songs but was staunchly unaware of the hip music of my day (fourth grade: N'Sync and the Backstreet Boys - my ignorance made me firmly uncool).
The remarkable thing about Nohavica is the spectrum of the human experience that he adresses. On one side, twenty/thirty years ago he was a man who wrote and sang brilliant protest songs against the regime in a grey time when most people kept their heads down. (It's pretty easy to protest the government in a country that has at least a theoretical notion of free speech; it takes a lot more personal bravery when you know consider the consequences in a totalitarian state). He wasn't allowed to record, but his songs survived and circulated through illegal concerts and tapes and twenty years after they were written my friends and I were still singing them around fires. At the same time he wasn't strictly, or even primarily, a protest song writer - he has hundreds of songs, silly and serious, about history, love, the metro, soccer, having children, alcoholism, and sex and life and death. His songs aren't all great, but they all seem to at least authentically comment some facet of a human experience that is both very universal and very specific. He still sings through the decades - when I was thirteen I heard him sing a song called "The plane from Prague to Montreal" at the Czech embassy in Washington, D.C.
This song is called Muzeum and it's about a tram ride in the town of Opava and a museum and life and eternity.

Can you poke Israel on Twitter?

Israel has acquired the user name @israel on Twitter, the microblogging Internet service, from the Spanish owner of a pornographic Web site, in an unusual transaction intended to help Israel exercise more influence over its image.

- The New York Times

Excepting Alice

With return to my educational institution comes less time available to post silly shit on the internet, but with sweaters and an eye to winter here is a very awesome print by the graphic Adolf Born called "Komensky's winter ice skating school in Naarden":

Them anarchopunks are mysterious (Last night on Rue Atwater...)

I saw a kid with a mohawk going down the (fourlane, semihighway) Atwater hill on his BMX - one foot on the handlebars and one on the seat. He may have been sixteen, but I was exponentially more impressed than with the omnipresent skinnylegged skinnyjeaned hipster kids who can't make it up University Street on their fixies.

On Pronunciation

I was fortuitously born into a country whose native language often lacks vowels and sounds to the untrained ear mostly like a throat infection. I then proceeded to skip the part of Czech school where they corrected the inevitable enunciation errors that tend to crop up due to the aforementioned vocal situation while at the same time moving to the States too late to learn how to pronounce American vowels correctly. Thus I remain the only person that I know of who has either an accent or a speech impediment in every language they speak. Additionally, because the languages I (somewhat) speak all have different emphasis placement and verbal structure, I tend to on the first try get it wrong, disastrously - (see the words impotent, Antipodes, and disgusting, among others). This came to a head the other day when I discovered that the pop minstrel responsible for such musical wonders as "California Girls" and "I Kissed a Girl" was named "Kay-tee", (not CAT - E) Perry.

All this to say that I empathized considerably with the poor Germans in this education ad, whose premise is "Don't go to schools whose name you can't pronounce, even if they're MIT."

Descent into the mundane conformity of the ninetofive grind

Today I felt rebellious because I drank coffee out of a white mug that said "tea" in black Times New Roman font.

Well, yes, that's also a fair point

Cheerfully cynical. My view of the world is not that different from Kafka's, really. The difference is that Kafka let it make him miserable and I refuse. Life is too short. My personal motto has always been: Joy in spite of everything. Not just mindless joy, but joy in spite of everything. Recognizing the inequities and the suffering and the corruption and all that but refusing to let it rain on my parade. And I advocate this to other people.
-Tom Robbins

Or just validation for my mindless ebullient exuberance.

Either way, my map of South America now has upwards of thirty colours on it, and ice cream was on sale today even if a national food chain robbed me unjustly of two tacos and left me hungry on the streets of Arlington.