Monthly Archives: January 2005

Jan29

The Plan

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My superstitious side of me, which admittedly is very small, has this suspicion. I am good luck for baseball teams.
Think about it. I was born in Minnesota. Six years later the Twins win their first World Series (unless you count the ones won by the Senators when the team was in Washington). Many years later, I move to Boston. Four years after that, the Red Sox win their first World Series in 86 years, breaking the supposed Curse of the Bambino. It has to be all me, right?
So I have a plan.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the Chicago Cubs, possibly because WGN broadcasted in Minnesota as a cable station and I would occasionally watch games and listen to Harry Caray do the play-by-play. The Cubs have an even longer drought than the Sox when it comes to World Series – going back to 1908. I figure, if I move to Chicago for grad school (and I’ve applied to two schools in the Chicago area), in about five years, the Cubs will win the World Series. And now that they’ve traded Sosa, who’s been losing his touch, to Baltimore, they’ve freed up the money to rebuild the team into a winner.
Of course, this could backfire if the White Sox grab my good luck instead. If a team from the AL Central is going to win anything, it better be the Twins. Maybe I should think about this plan a little more.

Jan27

Two bits

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After having not seen a new state quarter since I came across Texas last summer, this past week I came across not one, but two quarters I hadn’t seen before. Iowa, true to it’s lack of personality, has a one room school house on it. Apparently it is based on the Grant Wood painting, “Arbor Day.” And here I was expecting corn.
But I wasn’t entirely disappointed. For today, after making change for Anat, I acquired Wisconsin. Not only does the Wisconsin quarter feature an ear of corn, but also a cow and — most importantly — a wheel of cheese. Now that’s more like the state stereotypes I grew up mocking.
(Before I put my foot in my mouth, I looked up the Minnesota quarter… lakes, loons, and fishing. That seems perfectly respectable and representative to me.)

Jan25

E-bay silliness

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Look! You can buy Professor Wilczek’s DNA!
I should have swiped his dixie cup from one of the many physics open houses I went to. I could be rolling in dough by now. Alternatively, I’ve been to a few parties and gatherings with his daughter. I could have easily taken her cup without much fuss– that’s half his DNA and half his wife’s DNA in one batch.
Oh, the opportunities I missed at MIT. It wasn’t about the education – it was about collecting DNA from Nobel Laureates.

Jan24

Quotable Quotes

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Every year, the American Film Institute releases it’s list of the top 100 something-related-to-movies of all time. This past year it was songs, with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” topping the list. For the upcoming year, they’ve announced that their list will be “100 years… 100 movie quotes,” and the 400 quotes on the ballot are listed here.
Not surprisingly, Casablanca, one of my favorite movies, has the most candidates with 7. But surprisingly (at least to me), “… maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life,” is not one of them. On the other hand, looking at the Casablanca quotes that are nominated, I’d only want to remove “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.'” While this is the direct quote from the movie, the line everyone remembers, which was never actually spoken, is “Play it again, Sam.”
Other highlights of the list that amused, surprised, or delighted me…

Read the rest of this entry →

Jan21

Death of a Legend

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Today I got an e-mail from the house manager at East Campus, announcing with great sadness that James “Big Jimmy” Roberts died last night at his home in Brockton. Big Jimmy was the night watchman, known for his size, his ability to carry on a conversation long after you were done with it, and mostly his big heart and love for the students of the east side of campus. Sadly, it seems that his heart wasn’t quite big enough.
I last saw Big Jimmy over the summer when I was crashing on the hall after staying too late to catch the T back to Davis. Hanging out in the kitchen, I heard the familiar jangling of soda cans and large lumbering footsteps. Those cans would eventually be cashed in and the money would be used to buy us ice cream, chili, or some other treat. On nights when I was busy tooling or otherwise occupied, those sounds generally meant that it was time for me to close my door and avoid a long conversation about EC gossip. But on this night, I hadn’t seen him in awhile, so I just waited for him instead.
His head popped into the kitchen to swipe the checkpoint and then he saw me. “Hey, Erin, long time no see! What are you up to?” he said as he leaned all of his weight onto the kitchen table, panting as he caught his breath. It was always apparent that walking up and down the stairs of elevator-less East Campus wore Jimmy out. After my sophomore year, they moved him to a different shift, presumably for his health. But he hated it and rose a stink with his boss. As a compromise, he was stationed at Senior House and allowed to do substitute shifts at EC on occasion.
Jimmy once complained that students on the west side of campus were boring and never came out of their rooms. If you knew Jimmy, you’d understand why that was a problem for him. He was always interested in talking to the students, even when they weren’t so keen on talking to him. He often said that the best way to keep the place safe was to know all the residents. And it seemed that Jimmy knew everything. What he didn’t know, he made up. Ever hear about the student who had sex in every bathroom at MIT? That was a Big Jimmy story, and completely untrue, according to the student in question. He used to threaten to write a book about all of the stories he had gathered over the years. I can only imagine how entertaining that might have been.
I don’t remember what we talked about the last time I saw him. Possibly some embarassing story about a former EC resident or what kind of mischief was happening on another floor. Maybe we talked about my prospects for getting a job. I guess it doesn’t really matter.
An era ended last night. Goodbye, Big Jimmy. We’ll miss you.

Jan18

Mystery Hunt

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The MIT Mystery Hunt was this weekend, and as such, I spent my entire weekend on campus, most of it in 56-154. While it was a good clean hunt (no hinting required) and I got to see friends from out of town, this may have been the least amount of fun I have had during the actual hunt itself, due in large part to the fact that we had grossly overestimated our team’s ability. Well over half of our team members were first or second time hunters, an artifact of running the hunt for a year — freshman and most sophomores had never hunted before and the juniors had only hunted once and that was two years ago. A common complaint amongst those of us with lots of experience was that we were being stretched too thin — too many people wanted our help on too many puzzles at once. And as a result, I think we did a poor job of teaching the newer hunters good techniques. Had I realized before the hunt that we would have been so non-competitive, I might have focused more of my energy on being somewhat social and having fun, rather than spending all of Sunday angry about having to start the cross-sum over.
That being said, Setec wrote a good hunt and there were a number of puzzles that I really enjoyed working on.

  • Take Me Out – A baseball puzzle that I would have solved faster had I not thought that the 19th letter of the alphabet was R. But the end result was jcbarret, Amittai, and I playing out a baseball game with pieces of paper in order to calculate RBIs. This was quite possibly my favorite moment of the hunt.
  • Track 12 – This was mostly cposs, me, and someone I can’t remember. We managed to identify nearly all of the songs without using google and I very quickly noted that they were on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 songs of all time. And any puzzle that uses the song “Imagine” gets my vote.
  • Heavenly Hash – Just a nice clean word puzzle. I saw the method quickly and breezed through most of it, although lizd took over the last step, as I failed to notice the alphabetical order of the words.
  • Concerto Delle Oche Volanti – Anand, frosh-liz, and I solved this one. I may have liked it primarily because I was the one who broke into it, and that’s always a good feeling.
  • The Red Meta – Again, I liked this one because I solved it on my own five minutes after I woke up on Saturday (very early) morning. That doesn’t usually happen with metas.

Despite the stress (note to self: remember to eat during the hunt), I am looking forward to next year with the great hope that Phys Plant doesn’t fall into the same traps that we ran into.

Jan11

Published!

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There is a very good chance that I am in this book, set to be released on Valentine’s Day.
As the story goes, last year my coproducer and I went to the Regional Empowerment Workshop at Boston University for all organizers of The Vagina Monologues. Women came from all over the country — it was just good luck that it happened to be in Boston. We met each other there, both wearing our “Enjoy Vagina” shirt from 2002. We sat around, waiting for the meeting to start, and Eve Ensler herself came up to us to tell us how much she loved our shirts. A few minutes later, a photographer came by and asked if we would be willing to pose for a coffee table book they were putting together.
So we followed her upstairs and after we finished the photo shoot, we had a short interview. But the interview was interrupted because in walked Cat Ballou herself, Jane Fonda. She also loved our shirts and wanted to know if she could get one (sorry, we haven’t made that one in years). Later, once the workshop started, I got to watch her do an impersonation of an orgasming G-spot.
Now, my question is, does a coffee table book and a workshop get me into the six-degrees-of-separation game? Because if so, then I am only two degrees away from my favorite actress of all time: me -> Jane Fonda -> Katharine Hepburn (via On Golden Pond).

Jan10

Forgive Bless Me, Father

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While in the process of applying to graduate schools, I read a lot of papers (okay, mostly abstracts) relating to natural language processing. Including this one, which suggests that using search engines is a good way to determine how popular a given phrase is — the more hits, the more popular. With the amount of material out on the Internet these days, that seems more than reasonable, and I have in fact used that technique. But, unsurprisingly, it turns out not to be entirely failsafe.
When brainstorming names for our MIT Mystery Hunt team this year, someone suggested “Forgive Me Father, It Has Been Two Years Since My Last Mystery Hunt.” However, someone (possibly even Matt) suggested to me that that was the incorrect phrase and that Catholics say “Bless me, Father.” And so we did a quick comparison with Google, and determined that “forgive me father” was more popular, and thus correct. And then our team opted to not select my favorite suggestion, “Guillotined Priapism,” and “Forgive me, Father” became our name. But Matt McGann actually looked at Google’s results and it turns out that Catholic’s do say “Bless me”.
So… Bless us, Father, for we have sinned. We’re still going to be called “Forgive me, Father” anyway.

Jan9

The final out

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Thanks to a heads up from MRhé… and since I don’t particularly care about the Patriots being in the playoffs, I’ll say something about it.
The front page of The New York Times (subscription needed) had an article about Doug Mientkiewicz and the ball that made the final out of the 2004 World Series. It seems that Doug kept the ball, which is currently in a safe-deposit box in Miami, but now the Red Sox want it. The spokesman for Major League Baseball says Mientkiewicz owns the ball. The spokesman for the Red Sox says the team owns it — and of course he would say that.
It sounds like Doug is willing to have the ball displayed, as long as he can continue to own it. And there is some precedence there — Cal Ripken Jr still owns the baseball he caught to end the 1983 series, but it resides at the Babe Ruth Museum in Baltimore. Granted, he’s Cal Ripken Jr and Doug Mientkiewicz is, well… not. But why give different rights to superstars and legends? After all, in 1983, Ripken hadn’t yet saved baseball from a post-strike decline and Lou Gehrig’s record wasn’t even close to being broken. On the other hand, it does seem a little unfair to Boston that a guy who only played for the team for half the season and who’s future with the organization is unclear gets to own the ball. But hey, he caught it and the MLB says that he owns it so it’s up to him to determine its fate. Besides, I have a soft spot for first basemen who played in Minnesota and relocated to Boston — after all, I was one, along with Doug, David Ortiz, and David McCarty.
And speaking of Minnesota first basemen, that brings me to my favorite part of the article — Kent Hrbek. It seems fairly obvious that part of what the Times did in researching the story was to look up the fate of every World Series-ending baseball caught on the field in the past twenty years. And most get a brief paragraph or just a mention that so-and-so couldn’t be reached for comment. But the fate of the 1987 ball got quite a bit of coverage and plenty of quotes from one of my all time favorite Minnesota Twins, Hrbie, who incidently thinks that Mientkiewicz should run and hide and/or give the ball back. And I can just picture Hrbek, taking a break from ice fishing to talk to the New York Times, delighted to chat with the reporter. That man has had quite the life — growing up blocks from old Met Stadium, getting drafted by his home town team, winning two World Series, and retiring in Minnesota so that he can continue to just hang out and fish. And occasionally talk to newspapers who remember what a big hero he once was. He just makes me smile.

Jan6

It wasn’t a test!

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So, I’m watching game 3 of the 1975 World Series, which is being rebroadcast on NESN right now. First, it’s fun to watch Ken Griffey as a player in his own right, whereas now he’s usually referred to as Junior’s father. Second, mutton chops need to come back into style amongst ballplayers. Third, as I was watching, the screen went red and the obnoxious blaring noise came out of the speakers.
Oh great, I thought. It’s a test of the National Broadcast System.
Except that it wasn’t a test. We’re in a winter storm warning. I needed to tune to channel 8. Okay, channel 8. Except that channel 8 was just some unintelligible voice, presumbably telling me that it was snowing. And I was a little annoyed that my baseball game was interrupted for that. (Okay, yes, I could consult one of many books or websites and find out exactly what happened in the game, but that’s not the point.) The point is that New Englanders are wimps when it comes to weather.
Coming from the land of snow and ice, I had been spending the day thinking that it was too warm. After all, in Minnesota when it snows, it freezes and I don’t have to walk home in slush — although I usually risk slipping on ice. But this snow-rain-snow-rain crap is just obnoxious.
Oh, look, Dwight Evans just tied it up in the bottom of the ninth with a homerun. Go Sox!