Big news out of California… with some timely personal significance for my friends Brad and Russ who have been engaged for about a year AND are moving to California this summer so Brad can start a professorship at USC. Hurray Brad and Russ! Now they need to work on having kids so that we can call them Brussell Sprouts… and yes, they’re aware that I’ve been saving that pun for awhile now. The most intriguing part of the NY Times article was the following:

“The court left open the possibility that the Legislature could use a term other than ‘marriage’ to denote state-sanctioned unions so long as that term was used across the board — for both opposite-sex and same-sex couples.”

I’ve been saying for years that the answer is to just get rid of the term marriage in the legal system and make all domestic partnerships, gay or straight, civil unions. I realize this might not play well in the bible belt, but they got over interracial marriages (well, most of them did).

Inspired by vague recollections of a similar quilt owned by tfazio, lately I’ve been working on creating my own T-shirt quilt. Today I finished the front side — which is about 5’x7′.

Now I just need to create the back (same thing, but with the backs of the shirts) and sew them together… which means I’m less than halfway to being finished. If I ever make another quilt, I’m buying myself a rotary cutter. Cutting all those squares and strips with scissors is really tedious. If you want to see more pictures, they’re here.

Public service announcement by way of one Miss Sheeva Azma…
It is free cone day at Ben & Jerry’s today. Find your local scoop shop and go… thank me later.

A random thought I just had coming from the transoms of my sleep deprived mind (hurray conference deadlines)…
In an exchange of not-really-witty e-mails, a friend wrote something that he knew would annoy me. (If you’re curious, one of my pet peeves is the misspelling “prolly” — “probably” has three syllables! You can’t just remove the middle one and expect it to be okay!) In response, I simply wrote to him, “I hate you.”
But of course, I don’t really hate him… in fact, I hate very few people, if any at all. (Although I can certainly think of a number of people I dislike.) After I sent the e-mail I then wondered: if there was someone I actually hated, is there any situation in which I would send them e-mail that simply said “I hate you” with no further explanation?
I don’t think there is. While the concept of sending such a terse line to certain politicians is amusing to think about, if I truly hated someone and wanted them to know it, I would also want to expound upon why. So if in the future you receive such an e-mail from me, rest assured that I don’t mean it.
But, damn it, it’s P-R-O-B-A-B-L-Y.

First things first, I got a new phone number: 952-431-9500
Things I’ve noted throughout the day…

• Virgle — Easily the most entertaining April Fools joke
• Click on any video on You Tube’s homepage
• Custom Time for Gmail
• Open up a google word document and then go to File, and look at the line under “New Document.” (Thanks, Lou, for the heads up.)
• More from Google
• Livejournal announces a new advisory board member
• The microwave and toaster oven in our downstairs kitchen were mysteriously upside down today… as were all of the glasses, which were also filled with water. Gee, wonder who did that…
• My housemate, who has a tendency to forward every crime alert notification she receives, forwarded an e-mail that appeared to be a crime alert notifying us of jaywalkers on our street. The suspect descriptions seemed oddly similar to certain roommates of mine. And upon further inspection, the x-sender was not the same housemate as the from address.

I’ll add more as I discover them… although I should note that I’m officially bored with the RickRolling… ha, ha, we get it. Find a new joke.

I bought a new computer yesterday. It shipped last night. Now, to prevent myself from becoming smug and annoying, I’m not going to tell you what it is. (But if you want a hint, I got scores of advice from Quinn.) However, in line with my standard computer naming convention*, it will be called Octopus’s Garden.
My current laptop is four years old, no longer recognizes a battery (any battery — so I have no idea whether my current battery is dead, though it functions nicely as a paperweight), and has a fan louder than a jackhammer. Seriously — people have requested that I turn it off because of the noise. Others have just mocked me for the sheer size of the thing. Six months ago I decided it was time to replace it.
After much hemming and hawing and weighing of options (and letting price and the fact that I own a free Zune lead the charge), I actually placed an order for a ThinkPad in October. But thanks to Lenovo’s inability to ship it to me in a timely fashion, I got buyer’s remorse and canceled the order a week later. This led to six more months of hemming and hawing and weighing the options, this time discounting the ThinkPad due to a severe lack of customer service.
In the meantime, my eight pound laptop kept me chained to the wall, my savings account grew a little, and a housemate told me about boot camp, the $15 copy of Windows XP available to all Michigan students, and the words “educational discount” and “refurbished.” Suddenly price and the Zune weren’t issues anymore. And yet, I still hemmed and hawed for another week because I really don’t like spending money. But yesterday, I did it. I gave away my credit card information and hit send. I figured that, like in October, if I wanted to change my mind I could do so. Eight hours later, I got an e-mail saying they had shipped it. There’s no going back now.
But for the love of Pete, don’t call me a “switcher.” I hate that term.

* – My desktop is Strawberry Fields, my current laptop is Abbey Road, my printers have both been called Penny Lane, the two wireless networks in my house are Pepperland and Across the Universe, my now-belongs-to-my-sister iPod was Yellow Submarine, and the Zune is Glass Onion. Various hard drives have been Polythene Pam, Mean Mr. Mustard, Dear Prudence, Lovely Rita, and Nowhere Man.

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
~John Lennon, October 9, 1940 – December 8, 1980

First, a quote of the day from my (gay) housemate regarding the topic of Log Cabin Republicans: “Oh, them… they’re like unicorns.”

Second, a long overdue story from the Thanksgiving excursion to Chicago… On Friday my father and I went to the Adler Planetarium while my mother and sister shopped their way around the Magnificent Mile. On top of the three different planetarium theaters, the Adler also serves as a space science museum. In the Shoot For The Moon exhibit, specifically the Journey with Jim Lovell gallery, Dad and I were able to examine Gemini 12 while a film narrated by Lovell played on the screen above our heads. As Apollo 13 was both one of my favorite movies and favorite books growing up, I was pretty excited by the exhibit.
Once we had had our fill of observing just how claustrophobic space travel is, we turned the corner and heard Lovell’s voice again… only this time it wasn’t a film. Jim Lovell himself was explaining to what appeared to be his family how they got the spacesuit display mostly right, with the exception of the watch. It took everything I had not to start shrieking like a teenager watching The Beatles at Shea Stadium… an extremely nerdy teenager.
Dad and I stalked him for a bit, following closely behind him as it became increasingly evident that he wasn’t there in any official capacity — he was just going through the museum with his children like everyone else. Ever the Minnesotans, we didn’t go up to him or even indicate that we recognized him. Except for the fact that I was staring at him with my jaw on the floor like some sort of star struck fool… perhaps because at that moment, I was pretty star struck.
It was probably the polite thing to do not to interrupt his holiday weekend. Still, I regret not telling him that he has aged better than Tom Hanks.

What I love about Wikipedia is it’s way of presenting information about something that occurred five hours ago as if it was old news. Case in point: Al Gore’s article, particularly this line:

He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize in October, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” on October 12, 2007.

(I’ll ignore the grammatical redundancy in saying “… in October… on October 12, 2007.” Aw, heck… this is what wikipedia’s for, right? I just corrected it.)
In other news, congratulations, Al. Now will you definitively announce once way or another whether you’re going to run for president in 2008? (And you’d have my vote if you said you were.)

As I was washing my hands in the bathroom of my building just now, I glanced to my left and saw this on the counter.

Is it art or is there really a gumless wonder wandering around the CSE building somewhere? Either way, I’d really like to know the story behind it. (For whatever it’s worth, Kathy Travis is the name of one of our custodians.)
Update: Kyla got the real scoop.