The Best of Alex Whines →

I’ve been doing this tumblr thing for about 2 and a half years, accumulating 291 posts in that time.  Of those 291, some were not bad.  If you follow the link, you’ll find a list of these better posts, organized by topic.  Here are the topics:

• Games
• Music
• Nesting and recursion in fun places
• Food
• More words

Aren’t you intrigued?  If you’ve been following this blog for a bit and I left out your favorite post, please let me know.  Or if you come across a post in that list that you find to be awful and horrible and I should just stop, please let me know that too.  The main idea is that anyone who came across the list would want to befriend or employ me.

Nicknames for someone named Stuart or Stewart

I don’t know anyone named Stewart or Stuart, but the internet hasn’t done a very good job on the Stewart Nickname front so far, so here are several for all types of Stus.

Alliterative, mean:

• Stupid Stu
• Stinky Stuart
• Stressful Stu
• Stalker Stu

Alliterative, nice:

• Studly Stu
• Stunning Stu
• Stainless Stuart

Food based, mean:

• Chicken Stu
• Cold Stu
• Bouillabaisse (Fishy Stu)
• Dinuguan (Awful/Offal Stu)
• Lecso (Hungry/Hungary Stu)
• Cassoulet (Porky Stu)

Food based, nice:

• Sweet and Savory Stu
• Gaphama (Pumpkin Stu)
• Birria (Spicy Stu)

Food based, ethnicity Specific:

• Irish Stu
• Cholent (Jewish Stu)
• Kahdi (Indian Stu)

Only works for Stewart, mean:

• ‘Wart

For gifted athletes, nice:

• Kordell Stewart

Source: List of Stews

one year smarter

Here are some things I have learned in 2011:

• Even if tickets are $60 dollars and nobody will go with you, you should go see an R Kelly concert.
• The trick to making sure nobody sits next to you on the Megabus is to sit in the aisle seat with tissues and a bag of beef jerky on your lap.
• A nonboolean treatment of the truth conditions of disjunction is compositionally problematic.
• Supa Dupa Fly by Missy Elliot is an exceptional album.
• Goons is the most fun card in Dominion.
• Teaching is quite hard work.
• Pickle enthusiasm probably doesn’t factor too heavily when a woman is determining her romantic interest in a guy.  If it does, it’s inversely proportional.  (Exceptions may exist.)
• The Slovenian word for beer is pivo.
• If you’re having trouble picking a team in NBA Jam: On Fire Edition, you could do a lot worse than Hakeem Olajuwon and Kenny Smith.
• Border collies, or at least one border collie, is capable of reasoning by disjunctive syllogism.  I can’t find a video of the disjunctive syllogism, but here’s Chaser doing some fun stuff.
• Despite being on CBS, The Good Wife is very compelling, very good television, and features a stream of excellent guest appearances.

Alex vs. Public Speaking

• I was bar mitzahed. I threw up beforehand, squeaked out my haftorah, and sped through my thank-you speech, never looking up to acknowledge the audience.
• My freshman year of high school, in Ms. Bruska’s biology class, we had to make DNA models. Mine was pretty awesome: black and cherry twizzler nibs, threaded onto unfurled wire hangers and attached with markered toothpicks. We had to stand up in front of the class and present our models. I stood up and immediately started laughing. Uncontrollably. It was terrifying. Nothing was funny. Nobody else was laughing, but I couldn’t speak. Only mumble out apologies between laughter. I don’t remember if I ever actually got through my presentation. I only remember feeling like a giant asshole/idiot.
• At high school graduation, I gave one of six short student speeches. I spoke fast but at least audibly. I don’t remember anyone laughing, but I remember trying to make it as funny as I could. One of my friends told me afterward how fantastic it was, but I was unable to let myself trust him.
• Senior year of college, I needed to present my senior thesis, Spun Knots in Four-Space to the department. Forty five minutes of lecture and fifteen minutes of questions. I rocked the hell out of it. Eye contact, good chalkboard work, and a clear, conversational tone. Afterward, a professor I hadn’t taken a class with said that if I didn’t get a phd, she would hunt me down. I thnk she meant in math, but her threat got stuck in my head.
• Three weeks ago, my brother and Jess were married. I was the last of ten guests to speak on behalf of their union. Everyone fucking loved me. More than one person said I should do stand-up comedy (I shouldn’t). The only bad thing was that somehow there were people who knew me who didn’t already think of me as hilarious and charming.

Tomorrow, I begin teaching for the first time in my life, and all I can think about is freshman biology.

Excellent rap songs that sample Otis Redding that are definitely better than the new Kanye and Jay-Z song:

• Marley Marl and the Juice Crew - The Symphony (Hard to Handle)
• De La Soul - Eye Know (Dock of the Bay)
• Kanye West - Gone (It’s Too Late)
• EPMD - The Steve Martin (Let Me Come Home)

View high resolution

• Above, is the Google trends chart for the search term “google trends”
• The OKCupid profile “OKCupid” is a married 35-year-old who seems to work for OKCupid.  We’re a 90% match, OKCupid and I.
• The word most frequently looked up on Cambridge Dictionary’s online dictionary was “dictionary” (for December 2009, the most recent month I could find).
• The Wikipedia entry for Wikipedia was the fifteenth most frequently visited Wikipedia article of in 2009, the year I found most easily.  It is between Deaths in 2009 and United States.
• There are no synonyms for “thesaurus”.
• The search term “google” gets nearly 12 trillion hits on Google, which is more than “free”, “news”, or “adult”, but less than “facebook”.

View high resolution

I was in the early stages of constructing a nine post argument about how the Isley Brothers are the best band of all time, but I got distracted, first by wikipedia’s Examples of Songs That are Slow Jams, and then by R Kelly music videos, specifically the video for Echo.

In case you were interested, the nine posts would have gone something like this:

1. “Shout” and “Twist and Shout” are pretty iconic rock songs, aren’t they.
2. Something about Motown.
3. Explaining that my first exposure to the Isleys was the videos from the 90s in which Ron takes the persona of Mr. Big, some sort of ruthless mobster whose girlfriends constantly cheat on him with R Kelly.  Because this was my first exposure, I think it took a lot longer to realize that the Isleys are the best band ever than it should have.
4. Something about Jimi Hendrix, who played with the band before he changed his name to Jimi Hendrix.  He played guitar on Testify, a superfunky track in which Ron does (sort of) impersonations of Ray Charles, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Jackie Wilson, and the Beatles.
5. Embedding “It Was A Good Day” by Ice Cube and discussing notable Isley samples.
6. Sharing “Work to Do” and arguing that every training montage in every movie should be scored to it.
7. A discussion of the discovering the album Brother, Brother, Brother, which I got for my brother as a birthday present without hearing it.  A few years later, we were drunk hanging out on a Friday night and he forced me to download it.  it was then, listening to “Brother, Brother” from the Isley Brothers’ Brother, Brother, Brother with my brother that the seed that the Isleys were the best band ever started to form in my head.
8. A recommendation that you get an Isley Brothers tribute band to play your next wedding.  The bride would walk down the aisle to “That Lady”, obviously.  A quick googling turned up no Isley Brothers tribute bands, however.
9. A discussion of slow jams.

Anyways, you should probably go get 3+3 and Brother, Brother, Brother and either The Heat Is On or It’s Your Thing, and maybe Live It Up.  You can start there.  They’re all pretty great.

Image, which is the inside cover of 3+3, via funkyeahsoultrain.

Enemy Hunt, Friend Hunt

You’ll recall part of my masterplan was to make one enemy shortly after moving.  After one week, I still have no enemies, but I have a few candidates:

• One the other new grad students is also a math major, is enrolled in all the same courses as me, and even has the same advisors.  This would give us plenty to compete over.  Sadly, not only does he seem like a pretty good guy, but he could be a good resource when I can’t figure the homework out.  For now, we’re keeping him on the list of potential enemies, but also the list of potential friends.
• I’m also giving some thought to making my enemy All Bikers On The Sidewalk.  I’m no fan of bikers, but the sidewalk bikers are by far the worst of them.  There are scores of sidewalk bikers on my walk to and from school.  I had been really looking forward to this walk.  I only looked for housing in a one to two mile annulus around my department’s offices so that I could walk pleasantly to and from school each day.  And now All Bikers On The Sidewalk have decided to ruin large portions of my walk by getting in my way.  However, I am going to look into an alternate walking route before I declare war on the bikers and start pushing those helmetless idiots into the street.
• Someone made a small but overwhelmingly negative first impression on me, but I can’t say more than that, because the internet is a terrible place to talk shit about people.*

So, definitely not there yet.  Things still feel new though, and I’m sure if I’m patient and don’t force things, I’ll have my enemy eventually.  The friend hunt is going only slightly better, but that is bound to change tomorrow.

As you will also remember, my best plan for making friends involved pickles and whiskey.  Well, phase one of the plan—a plan I have given the working title Operation Domination via Fermentation—occurs tomorrow, when I bring some exceedingly tasty pickles to the department picnic.  If my calculations are correct, I will be unimaginably popular within 17 days.

*For that previous list of rivals, I also left off one person who I actually strongly dislike, but I included it here, however vaguely, because you can’t have a list with two items.

View high resolution

Three-fourths of the way through the year, completing every level in Challenge Mode of Peggle seems like a shoo-in for one of my biggest accomplishments of the year.

Here are some more of my most memorable video game achievements:

1. Launching the final spaceship by beating Type B in Tetris for the Gameboy.  This occurred at sleepaway camp, where I didn’t make any friends and instead played lots of Gameboy.
2. Getting a high score above 1,000,000 on every stage in Tony Hawk 3.  Trivial at the airport, easy enough on the Cruise Ship and in Rio, quite difficult in Suburbia.
3. Mastery of the ninja rope mini-game in Worms: Armageddon.  The goal was to use the ninja rope to get as many flags as possible before time runs out.  When you reached a flag, you’d get a 5 second bonus.  I got to the point where I’d get through the loop of all the flags with more time than I started with, suggesting that I could play forever.
4. Defeating The Ultimate Weapon in Final Fantasy 7.