Trivia Night (or: Why a Classics Major is Useful)

Since Rob Roy was the guest host for the Bistro 33 trivia night, I decided to stop by and support him.  As usual, I only knew a few of the answers, but I found some good teammates, and we managed to get 4th place or so out of about 20 teams.

Halfway through the first round, this question was asked:

What is the name of the device used to measure wind speed?

Since nobody on my team had any clue what the answer was, I decided to use my classical education and make up a word.  I assumed it would end in “-meter,” since pretty much all measuring devices have that.  I remembered the two Greek words for wind, pneumos and anemos, and the Latin spiritus.  The extra hint was that the word was five syllables long.  Since all of the other combinations sounded funny, I ended up having our scribe write down “anemometer.”

Yes, we wrote down anemometer.

I’m pretty sure there are more useful situations where my major can come in handy, but I’m still rather proud of this one.

Blogging Challenge

I guess this means I’m now out of the challenge.  I guess it’s probably a good thing, as my posts for the past week have been rather lame.

Squirrels

A few days ago, as Caitlin and I were walking through the quad, we stopped and watched some squirrels eating nuts around the base of a tree.  This is by far not an uncommon experience, but we’re both still rather mesmerized by the little rodents.  Then Caitlin threw this question at me:

What does squirrel poop look like?

It had never dawned on me until that moment that I had never seen (or recognized) squirrel poop, despite the fact that I see about a hundred of these a day.  UC Davis has the largest ground squirrel research center in the world, yet I have never seen the waste product of a single one of them.

Oddly enough, a day or two later, as we were again taking a stroll through the quad, we stopped to watch a particularly cute one eat a nut.  As he scampered away, Caitlin once again asked this question.  At that very moment, the squirrel looked at us, then nonchalantly did his little business, and climbed up the tree.  The amazing part about it was that had we not been interested in that exact action, we would not have even noticed, since he did it in such a swift and unassuming motion.  If only I had that ability.

No, I take that back.

Bike Rack

I just scored a wonderful rack for my bike.  Now I can strap my briefcase to my bike, wear a suit with a strap on the right leg, and totally be a professor.  Either this is really cool or really nerdy.  Probably the latter.

Apathy

It amazes me how much finals week makes me apathetic.  Apathetic toward school, apathetic toward studying, apathetic toward blogging.  I really need to do something more interesting.

Lazy

Sometimes, when it’s getting really late at night, instead of posting something intelligent, I post a random animal noise.

Sometimes, I don’t even do that.

meow.

Life

Today was the last day of instruction for winter quarter.  This means I have to get through finals week, then there is only one more quarter before I graduate, one more quarter before life.

Scary.

How Exciting!

Scott Paddon is my new (old) friend.  He is basically me in several years, with all of my interests given a few to mature.  How exciting!

Essays

Last night at midnight, I had an essay I needed to turn in.  I finished it at 11:47 or so, then decided to try my hand at one of the extra credit options we had due at the same time.  The extra assignment was to write a review of part III of “Century of the Self,” an interesting series on psychology made by the BBC.

I realized immediately that an essay produced in entirety in ten minutes would not be a very good one, so I went the other way and tried to make it as horrible as possible.  Or at least as humorous as possible.

My final paragraph was regarding a section of the video starting at 23:13.  It’s a rather interesting segment, and I’d actually recommend you watch it.  It’s only about three minutes long.

Here’s part of what I turned in:

I can’t write a review of this without mentioning “radical lesbian nuns.”  I’m seriously trying to get a band together, just so we can be called this.  If our inner desires can make a nun become both radical and lesbian, maybe these things should be released more often.  At least in nunneries, where it would be the most beneficial.  Because, you know, who wouldn’t benefit from a radical lesbian nun?  Jesus?  Yeah, probably not Jesus.