I Have Something to Say

Actually, I have two or three things to say.

The first is that I have an exceptionally understanding girlfriend. She stayed up very late last night while a wrote a colossally bad essay in which I made barely substantiated arguments that two characters were the same character because they were "kind of a little alike." Jessica not only stayed up, but she kept me from having a nervous breakdown from lack of intelligent arguments.


The second thing that I have to say is that after staying up until nearly 4am, nothing makes my day better than a #16 on wheat from Jimmy John's and a double espresso with whipped cream from Bar Giuliani across the street.

Bar Giuliani is the best coffee bar in Champaign. Know why? Plentiful seating, decently priced coffee, free wi-fi, proximity to the quad, and, above all, it is QUIET! It is pleasantly fucking quiet and I love that about the place. I am sitting in a coffee bar with fourteen different people and all I can hear is pages ruffling and my own keys clacking out this inane entry. I love this fucking place and I want everyone to know that.

Ok.

From The Onion

Known as an unorganized and often unreliable person, Henschler reports that in recent months, voices in his head have been making "pretty good points" about time management.

The Rest of the Article.

This Might Look Like An Update, But Really It's An Essay On Madame Bovary That Is Due At 9am Tomorrow.

Yahoo! in Chinese Dissident Rumpus (from The Register)

Yahoo! has been accused of assisting Chinese authorities for a second time to apprehend a Chinese dissident. Li Zhi was given an eight-year jail sentence in December 2003 for "inciting subversion" over comments criticising official corruption posted on online discussion groups. The case against Li (a 35-year-old ex-civil servant from Dazhou in south west China) was based on data supplied by Yahoo!'s Hong Kong subsidiary, according to media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

Last year, Yahoo! was criticised over similar accusations that it bent over backwards to help Beijing gather evidence that led to the imprisonment of reporter Shi Tao for "divulging state secrets", by forwarding an email about the risks of referring to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests to foreign websites. According to Reporters Without Border, 49 cyber-dissidents and 32 journalists are in prison in China over internet postings criticising Chinese authorities.

The Rest of the Article.

Also, I would like to congratulate The Register for using the word rumpus.

RUMPUS!!

What Squeo Knew, I Now Know.

Apparently, there is a new service called "Ask For Cents" that answers questions. It will cost money in the near future, however at present it is a free service. Simply send your question via e-mail to q@askforcents.com and wait for a response...

Look what I learned!!
Everything from the most mundane knowledge:

Q: Who really shot JFK?
A: The CIA

Q: Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar?
A: Daddy stole the cookies from the cookie jar.

Q: Where was that stooped and mealy-colored old man I used to call Poppa when the merry-go-round broke down?
A: Laughing his head off by the ticket booth

To the most crucial:
Q: Why don't we do it in the road?
A: Because there's the everpresent danger of being hit by a car. Very dangerous.

Q: What do the most beautiful breasts in the world look like?
A: Not too large, not too small, probably a small c cup and firm. Plus they must be real, not silicone.

Q: Soup or Salad?
A: Soup

Truly a great service.

For Chris and Erin

My deformity!

My cursed short legs.

That is my brother in front of me and he is only 2 inches taller. Explain the optical illusion.

EXPLAIN IT!

#85

She strives and drives to keep us alive
the blessed operator
number eighty-five

This one goes out to Hateful Sean (the co-author) and the wonderful woman who pilots the Gold East in the afternoon, Operator #85.

She is the greatest thing to ever happen to the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District.

From Concerning the Jews by Mark Twain

Editor's Note To Mark Twain: Holy shit, Sam.

"If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one per cent. of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star-dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.

He has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished.

The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

Links:
Concerning the Jews by Mark Twain
Also, humor me

Official wants coca fed to school children

Another news article: this must be a real live blog, just like its fellows.

Hello, fellows!

LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Bolivia's foreign minister says coca leaves, the raw material for cocaine, are so nutritious they should be included on school breakfast menus.

"Coca has more calcium than milk. It should be part of the school breakfast," Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca was quoted as saying in Friday's edition of La Razon.

The new leftist government of Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, has vowed to promote the legal uses of coca, the plant used to make cocaine, which is revered in Andean culture and is commonly chewed or made into tea.

Morales, himself a former coca farmer, has pledged to fight the drugs trade but at the same time protect the cultivation of coca in Bolivia -- the world's third-biggest cocaine producer after Colombia and Peru.

A coca leaf weighing 100 grams contains 18.9 calories of protein, 45.8 mg of iron, 1540 mg of calcium and vitamins A, B1, B2, E and C, which is more than most nuts, according to a 1975 study by a group of Harvard University professors.

I want me a Cocasalad with croutons.

From A Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut by Mark Twain

"Now tell me, why is it that a conscience can't haul a man over the coals once, for an offense, and then let him alone? Why is it that it wants to keep on pegging at him, day and night and night and day, week in and week out, forever and ever, about the same old thing? There is no sense in that, and no reason in it. I think a conscience that will act like that is meaner than the very dirt itself."

Mad Can

Today, I continued my survey of bathrooms on campus. My goal: to find the most luxurious, clean, and vacant facility available. My favorite so far has been the second floor men's lavatory at Altgeld, but I will continue to strive for greater places to lay my waste to rest.

After my poetry class, I felt a pressing urge to find a bathroom and I went, after some consideration, to Illini Hall, an imposing, moldering structure sitting atop an Illini burial ground. A gold painted sign stretches over the entrance; Don't let that illusion of grandeur fool you, in reality, the place is barely standing and it reeks of decaying gym socks and death.

Illini Hall has three floors. The first floor bathroom looked promising, but was occupied, an immediate disqualification. I will never move my bowels in an occupied room, no matter what I threaten. I ventured to the second floor and sought a better sanctuary. The second floor was eerily dark after the blinding sunshine of the February afternoon and I tightened my grip on my pocket knife as I continued my measured tread over the aged and warped boards of the floor. Every office I looked into was occupied either by mad-eyed academics onanists or noxious palpable odors. I choked back my rising bile and strode past them, gaining courage from the Toledo steel in my right hand. In the corner of the second floor, I located another lavatory. It was dark and populated by ectoplasms never before seen or smelled. Evil emanations issued from all corners, but I brushed past them and found the light switch. With the spirits driven to the outer reaches of the circle of light issuing from the single bulb in the ceiling, I felt safe to move my bowels. I won't ever defecate in the presence of another human, but I was about to bring some competition to the otherworldly and malodorous menagerie incumbent to that privy.

Into the stall I crept, taking care to build myself a nest of toilet paper on the pearly black seat of the commode. One layer, two layers, three layers. The crepey paper strata rose slowly and I finally bared my lower half and seated myself over the bowl.

BUT WAIT! I had company. One of the mad ones, an academic, had broken from his pen-like den and seemed intent on relieving himself on just the other side of the metal barrier. He came within a foot of my seated form and groaned softly as he released his steaming amber fluids into the porcelain receptacle. I could hear him repack himself with a grunt and quick zip and then he was gone.

Without washing his hands.

FOUL WRETCH! My mind reeled, as if struck with a rubber mallet of the kind commonly for sale at many hardware stores, nationwide. He could have touched anything in this room. HEATHEN! My sensibilities shattered beyond repair, I made as if to fashion myself a pair of gloves from the tissue-like paper that reposed in mammoth rolls on the wall of my compartment. This cannot work, I realized. With resignation in my heart, I used my crude gloves to clean myself, as delicately as possible. Taking care not to touch more of the bathroom fixtures than was necessary, I used the paper products at my disposal to press the lever that sent my waste into oblivion with a sudden roar of cleansing water. With a new piece of tissue, I opened the stall door and operated the faucets. Finally, I nudged open the door and, fleeing as though several pounds lighter, I escaped into the sunlight.

True Story.

As for the bathrooms at Illini Hall, I'd grade them at a B-.

And the Beat Goes On...

I experienced a few panicked moments in the last 36 hours when I thought I had lost my ipod. I am not exceptionally attached to my ipod. it is nice to have when traveling and occasionally convenient when studying, but it is not essential to my being. I like it. It's nifty, but it doesn't transport me to another level of consciousness.

But the thought that I had lost something that cost a great deal more money than i can comfortably lose dismayed me. Where could it have gone? One day it was in the inside pocket of my coat, the next day, it was gone. It has my phone number etched into the back, a reasonably good person would call if they found it. Just because Erin Hogan would keep it doesn't mean everyone would. I resolved to take the same course of action I do when anything troubles me: I decided not to think about it.

So I didn't think about it.

Until I saw it, laying on the frozen ground outside of J.'s car this morning. My little silver ipod, wrapped in its headphones and with a quarter-sized blotch of bird shit on the back, just under the phone number that the bird was too inconsiderate to call.

So I wiped it off, put it in her glove box for safe keeping and congratulated myself for not losing anything important this year.

(Seriously, I still have my coat, gloves, hat, scarf, laptop, ipod, cell phone, wallet...I'm complete.)

Literature

There's something bearing down on me. There is a great suffocating oppression that thickens the air and clots my throat and weighs down my eyelids and renders my mucous membranes arid.

It is very unpleasant. My eyes are continually shrink-wrapped and my tongue is thick and I cannot help but feel that I am being oppressed by Literature and Want. Literature because it is pregnant with decades of dust and scholarship and Want because I want more than anything to be the repository of all of this and I feel limitations being set...concepts that I can grasp but cannot conceive. The pages are all so invariably rich that I want to vomit my displeasure and suck down something simple and graceless and candied, like Harry Potter.

Even Mark Twain, the silly bastard, writes such insanely elegant mockery that he doesn't at all feel out of place with Nabokov or Tolstoi.

it is extraordinarily depressing to be told that Nabokov's work is so layered that no one in the class (but I feel the statement very personally) can hope to grasp all of his complexities and games. I cannot, apparently, even pronounce his name correctly.

I like the things he writes. I like them a lot. It is just so discouraging to think that there are many other people who have read his work and are reading his work and understand it and appreciate it much more than I do. It is crushing to think that there are more sophisticated loves than mine.