Happy Chinese New Year!

Still suffering from post-Boston work backlog. Photos up soon! For now, check out Clocky, the alarm clock which "runs away and hides when you don't wake up." Which i guess works assuming it doesn't run into a muffled corner. hmm. Cute though!

AFK

Midterms over, off to boston 'til Sunday.

Haiku Schmaiku

Today's lunch was a most curious and tasty lunch of linguini laced with vegetables and in a peanut butter/rice vinegar/soy/sugar sauce, spiced up with red pepper flakes and with just a hint of ginger/garlic/onions to make it Asianish. Served chilled just like soba (not like it takes much to chill things here) on a bed of lettuce. Stick a fancy name on it and put it on a zen black plate and it could've been a fusion dish served at some michellin star-red restaurant, but this was simple fare at the Stuart Cafe where i'm hiding from the snow and using their powerpoints. muahaha.

Anyway, the point is that I also drank this bottle of green tea, which had this verse at the side:

"on the pond
a curled duck feather
catches the breeze"

Which is all well and good, except that below that it says that it's the "ITO EN New Haiku award winner". Which is ........ odd, since that is not at all like a haiku, except for the tone of it. hmm. scammy. Surely the Japanese company which makes this strange Japanese tea (or, well, Japanese sounding company) knows its haikus from its tankas from its free verse? So a quick browse to their website shows that they're trying to push a form of New Style Haiku which is basically free verse. Which is totally cheating, since i think so much of the beauty of haikus comes from working within the constraints of 5-7-5 syllables. *Traditionalist*

P.S. if any of you is wondering why i'm suddenly posting so much, I have no idea either, but i put it down to the fact that it's midterm season and suddenly i have this immense need for procrastination. hm.

Why it is cold

1. Because the pipes which vent steam now seem to vent ice



2. Because your jacket crackles like the skin of roast pigs when you walk out into the cold


3. Because lake michigan and chicago river have blocks of ice on them


4. Because the insides of your nose stiffen up when you walk outside


5. Because your toes feel like falling off after walking 10min to class

Viva la Chicago!

Go Bears!

So Chicago finally made it into the Superbowl finals, and the whole city is crazy over it: no photos because i keep forgetting to bring my camera, but the Art Institute lions are wearing football helmets, and the office buildings have entire faces selectively lit up to spell out messages like "bear down, bears!" and "go bears!". Awesome!

And in church today, my priest gave us two passages to meditate upon, and this is probably one of the rare occaisions i'll post scripture on my blog, but:

Isaiah 59:11 "We all growl like bears."

Psalms 32:9 "Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee."

And there was also a blessing of throats (all the better to shout at the TV with)... so amusing! And everyone took it really really seriously.

Weather.com

"Today's forecast: High of -13 degrees celcius. Windy. Snow flurries and a few snow showers throughout the day. Very cold. Wind chills may approach -26C. High -13C. Winds W at 25 to 40 mph. Chance of snow 30%.


Tonight's forecast: low of -18 degrees celcius. Bitterly cold. Evening flurries with a better chance of snow showers overnight. Wind chills may approach -29C. Low -18C. Winds W at 20 to 30 mph. Chance of snow 40%."


Yup, definitely time to go walk around. First time i've heard a weather forecast use the words bitterly cold.

Intellectual curiosity

Today i found myself in Crerar searching for a forestry book on Indonesia's 1997 forest fires (they actually have it here!) and i realised just how long it's been since i've gone to Crerar. The landscape in front of the building has completely changed since the addition of a new building or two and it took me a while to actually remember which building Crerar was supposed to be. I just don't come to this part of the world often.

And then i was reminded of just how quiet Crerar is... the top level of the building where i'm sitting right now has probably about 4 people scattered around the floor in random nooks and crannies. Nobody is in sight, and nobody is within earshot either. It's pretty spooky, but the clean scientific hospitalish setting is more reassuring than the dark foreboding which is the quiet spooky law library. Only Crerar also gives this feeling that you have the whole place to yourself, which is sort of cool, when you include the fact that it's chock full of tomes of knowledge. There were countless volumes on forest fires in the shelf where i was looking, which actually (sadly) ignited a little spark of excitement deep within my soul. So much knowledge!

A quick visit to the toilet revealed the nature of Crerar's usual inhabitants - the walls are full of premed graffitti. Obscene drawings of toulene jostled for space with lewd remarks like "for a good time, call #QC141.P211". Clearly they aren't as vigilant with removing graffitti here as they are in other places. All the better for my amusement. In place of the usual proclamations about being well endowed that adorn bathroom stalls, there were people showing off their great manliness with displays of GPA and MCAT scores on the walls. Enough of this vulgarity! I head out to find a place to sit and ostensibly do work, but since nobody is actually watching, I end up blogging instead.



(Oh, and if you were wondering what QC#141.P211 was, it turns out that no such book was on the shelf. boo. However a quick browse through the library catalog shows that the closest QC#141 was the journal of rheology. )