I bet I'm the only person you've ever known to spend his twenty-first birthday at gay square dance lessons!  It hasn't happened yet, but I have been in those lessons for a bit over a month now and they'll keep going through sometime in February.  It's actually a lot of fun!  Never mind that I'm twelve years younger than the next youngest person there...

Apparently straight callers will show up to shout out the moves at the dances from time to time and it completely baffles them when they realize how so many of the dancers choose to dance in roles that don't match their physical sex.  I won't bug them, though, as I "dance boy".  Being unable to tell left from right (or, for that matter, reft from light as I had once so shamefully said by mistake!), I figured that I didn't need to try and teach myself directions while also having to remember that I was a "girl" for the purpose of dancing!

But yes, if you happen to have any interest whatsoever (and you don't have to be GLBT to join the gay square dance club!  We have a married couple who show up every week and blend in quite nicely with the rest of us), the address is http://www.puddletowndancers.org

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WTF.

I can't sell back my complete works of Shakespeare because they have come out with a new edition!

Ω
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I HAVE FOUND A WAY TO NOT HAVE TO TAKE PHYSICS IN THE FALL.  THIS MEANS I WILL BE DONE WITH STUPIDLY LARGE LECTURES AND H-ITT CLICKERS FOREVER!

Read THIS if you're upgrading to the new iTunes and have any track names with non-standard characters in them (characters such as é, ü, ø, î, ï, û, ß, and any characters from outside the Latin alphabet, are ALL affected):

http://community.livejournal.com/macosx/5768986.html

If you don't change an advanced setting early then your tracks will be automatically renamed into something that isn't comprehensible.  ANNOYING.

Now to manually rename the mauled tracks that were auto-renamed since the "upgrade"...

I went to Cirque de la Symphonie with Miko last night.  Now I'm thoroughly convinced that Gerard Schwarz needs to step down as principal conductor -- it was the best I'd ever heard the Symphony perform and it was under their associate conductor, AND all their principal string players (plus several stands' worth of other players in most sections) had left for the summer chamber music festivals.

The performance was AMAZING.  ZOMG.  Acrobats, a juggler, a contortionist, and strongmen were all there.  And with the student discount, a pair of tickets set me back only $10 when the seats would have ordinarily retailed for $43 apiece in advance.  I think my plugging of the event at the RC worked quite nicely as when I arrived the pair of seats next to mine were taken by two EEPers.

so I had a good weekend.

Also, I am in the process of convincing Sarah the class(ic)ist that it's worth her time to go to the Emerson String Quartet concert in October.  Student tickets are cheap, and that ensemble has won eight or nine GRAMMY awards in their time together.  She's a sponge for anything you can get her to believe is "culture" (although she doesn't use "culture" as a biologist might -- "learned behavior".  She is only concerned with "civilized" culture), and right now she's entirely convinced that classical music is culture of interest.  It probably stems from watching the classically trained musicians in the RC talking about composers or whistling/humming melodies at each other and playing the guess-what-this-is game.  She probably feels a bit left out when the girl next to her can pick out a theme from Dvorak's "American" quartet when it's idly whistled at the bus stop.

In any case, I've now lent her two of the Emerson Quartet's GRAMMY-winning albums (the complete Shostakovich quartets, 2001 winner for best chamber music album and best classical album; also "Intimate Voices" which was the best chamber music album of 2006, featuring Grieg, Nielsen, and Sibelius) for the weekend and will probably hear her opinion of these tomorrow.  If she's listened to ALL of it then she's probably crazier than she's shown herself to be as that's six CDs' worth, but you never know with a girl like Sarah.

so there's my update.  I should do this more often.

Yesterday I actually logged into Facebook.  I almost never do this, by which I mean that lately I've been updating my LJ more often than logging onto Facebook.  But I logged in and I checked on my event invitations.  Among them was one to a wedding for a guy in my high school graduating class.

He's either 19 or 20 right now.  I haven't seen him in four years, and I barely knew him to begin with (hooray for Facebook and self-labeling as "friends" with people who are very nearly strangers... or who actually are strangers, in some cases).  THIS IS REALLY WEIRD.  Early marriage and electronic mass-mailed invitations.

Please note the amazing WIN that has happened against Austria-Hungary in Diplomacy.  By that I mean that Austria-Hungary has been completely shanked in the first year and lost two of its three home supply centers; it's poised to lose its third in 1902.

Germany => Magna Germania.  Russia, France, and Italy are likewise performing quite well indeed.

http://students.washington.edu/sbroger/diplomacy.html

Three days into it and Diplomacy is becoming a rather obsessive and delightful part of my life.  Hellz yeah.

1.  The TWL ("The Word List"?) dictionary is a near match of the Official Scrabble® Players' Dictionary, but it has some strange omissions of words you'd think would be there.  For instance, UDON (a heavy wheat noodle) is recognized as a word but GOUDA (a variety of cheese, much more well-known among speakers of English) is not.  IFF (mathematical <i>abbreviation</i> for "if and only if") is recognized as a conjunction, but XOR (Boolean logic conjunction "A or B, but not both A and B") is not.  So far I haven't noticed and remembered any other big surprises.

2.  The program has a couple of glitches.  Once it gave my opponent another turn immediately after swapping tiles, and neither of us could make sense of it.  In the endgame scoring, if nobody clears their rack entirely the computer still adds to your score the value of your opponents' tiles.

3.  THE PROGRAM LAGS LIKE THERE TRULY IS NO TOMORROW!

Sonata Pimpante is the name of a work by Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo, and I'm trying to figure out what exactly it means.  The word "pimpante" could conceivably be either Spanish or Italian, and although people tell me -ante is not a Spanish suffix, it exists more frequently in Spanish-English dictionaries than in Italian-English dictionaries.

Some of the early translations include:
(from Spanish): calm, unconcerned, self-contained
(from Italian): lively, FULL OF BEANS

LMAO at FULL OF BEANS.

Does anyone know what the definitive answer is for this?  kthx.

Mystery #1:
I'm seriously starting to wonder about the content I send in my text messages.  The predictive text message software draws upon words I've typed out (and sent) in the past and suggests them for possible spellings as I type them out.  It just suggested "franc", and now I'm wondering why I ever made any comments about obsolete French currency.
Mystery #2:
A week or so ago I was at the Central Library (Seattle Public Libraries, not UW Libraries) rummaging through their CDs and came across one with the wrong Dewey Decimal number.  It was a recording of a Schubert piano sonata and a few of his art songs for piano and tenor, but the CD was numbered as (and filed as) an orchestral recording.  The location was right for the Dewey number, but the Dewey number was incorrect for the CD's content.  So... which is sadder: that the Seattle Public Library attached the wrong Dewey Decimal number to one of its CDs, or that I actually <i>found</i> that CD and noticed it?

On a completely separate note, I have finally upgraded the RAM on my MacBook so that it has 2 GB instead of the 512 MB it came with.  Soon I will probably figure out how to switch out the keycaps and re-label it so that the key labels actually represent their output on my screen.  It's not like I ever look at the keys when I'm typing, but I don't know the QWERTY/Dvorak position equivalences all that well and that turns out to be somewhat problematic when I'm doing command + _____ functions.

HOLY SHIT.  An actual post!

That made me grin from ear to ear.

... and I'm not sure which is sadder:  that the Seattle Public Library had the wrong Dewey Decimal number on one of their CDs, or that I found this CD and brought it to the attention of a librarian.

LOL is excreted by humans and carried (via river input) to the ocean.  Once in the ocean, LOL is taken up as a food source by phytoplankton and incorporated into organic compounds, becoming Particulate Organic LOL.  As these phytoplankton are consumed and parts of them excreted as fecal pellets, the Particulate Organic LOL sinks to the interior of the ocean and some of it is ultimately buried in the sediments.

Now, an interesting thing occurs when Particulate Organic LOL reaches the sea-sediment interface:  It spontaneously converts to Particulate Organic ROFL while it is swept over the ocean floor to its final resting place!

Who knew that such a cycle existed?

ZOMG. This is awesome.

Also, I am amused that you can indicate the level of adult content in your LJ posts.

My entries are getting less noteworthy every time.

I went to the caucus yesterday and ended up voting for Hillary. DON'T KILL ME! If Obama gets the nomination, I'd still vote for him over McCain any day.

Also, this is a spectacular product. Don't you agree? "Take the work... out of your workday!"

themodpoet: Obama has the ability to bring people together
themodpoet: So does farting in an enclosed space

In other topics, I love my Chemical Oceanography course and am kicking butt in it. w00t! Lise de la Salle is coming to town on February 20, and I have my ticket to see her.

Also, I made a quasi-ASCII art drawing of a stick figure using Greek letters. It isn't genuine ASCII art, though, because I used an omega as a head shape and put other letters inside it for eyes (phi, theta), a nose (lower-case delta), and a mouth (lower-case sigma). I call that figure Helen.

Please tell me that Betelgeuse is not code for "Beat All Jews".

This just in from the "Help Wanted" section of classified ads in The Daily:

HISTORIAN SEEKS SINGLE Asian woman to help research, travel, and form a friendship. Must be bilingial (sic), have passport, and will need a resume. Salary negotiable. Please respond to PO Box 1105 Issaquah, 98027, Attention: William

*** *** ***

Is anyone else wondering about the "single" and "form a friendship" parts? It sounds like a wonked-up personals ad.

I HAVE SO MUCH AWSUM THIS QUARTER.

Three classes, and they are as follows:
GERMAN 351 - 5 credits - Vienna in 1900 (taught in English)
OCEAN 400 - 4 credits - Chemical Oceanography
OCEAN 450 - 4 credits - Climatic Extremes

Chemical Oceanography is especially nice because it abbreviates to ChemO... so if it frustrates me too much I can claim that chemo is making my hair fall out. And my Climatic Extremes course has two professors who are both named Paul and prefer that we address them by their first names. My Vienna in 1900 course is going to have me present a short talk on Alban Berg in about three weeks, and I've also opted to submit a final paper (on the Second Viennese School of Music) for the course instead of taking a final exam. We're reading some spectacular modernist German literature in translation, but it's a bit beyond me at times. Hence the value of live class discussions and a class blog.

On a completely unrelated note, I am highly amused at the event Tribeta is sponsoring tonight. It's a talk by a Department of Pharmacology professor, and the topic is science of body weight regulation. They're serving free pizza at the event. GUILT TRIP.

ALOHA HOLA

(This post is pointless, but it's kinda fun in a stupid way.)

By the way, zestythelemon, I LOVE YOUR DANCE SUITE AND THE GAVOTTE ESPECIALLY. But you knew I loved Baroque dance suites. Yay counterpoint.