The Title of the Blog - part 4

Four weeks in and the Brad Pitt-Morgan Freeman-Kevin Spacey film Seven had just come out. Went to see the film with a couple of frat bros, and I wanted to walk out of the theater. I was totally icked out.

Pride. Wrath. Lust. Envy. Glutton. Greed. Sloth. The seven deadly sins. Today, for each one of these some script writer is reaping a million dollars simply because he could incorporate them all into a movie that a few thousand people will see. He fully has that right, as do the people who directed, produced, and starred in that same film. These people are some of the finest in the world at their craft, and they should be rewarded in that they can convince us to come see their movie. I was convinced last week, and I spent a dollar an hour to be horrified and repulsed.

In no other fully-fictitious movie have I ever seen so violent, so torturous, so repulsive a series of murders as those in this movie. During the file I thought more than once of leaving the theater and had I not driven my fraternity brothers there, I probably would have. Instead, I sat through seven murders and a week of brown rain and surrendered my money to do it.

Since then I’ve spent a few more hours asking myself why I did that. A few years ago I paid for two people to see LA Story, a romantic comedy. Before that, for me to watch Hoosiers, a triumph for the little men of the world. And I’ve seen The Muppet Movie a dozen times. These I understand, because each of them gave me a time to escape from the real world in which I am forced to reside for my other hours. Seven I still don’t understand. In it I got a bit of boiled-down, concentrated evil, something that would disturb me far more than it entertained me.

Every morning I sit down to the Indianapolis Star and work my way through the comics and the sports page. Both of these give me a bit of joy, a few minutes of fun. I usually avoid the front page except to skim the headlines. Day in and day out I find stores of murder and robbery, of rape and terrorism. Those things are real; we have no escape from the facts of our world. I honestly sincerely wish that they were different, but they are not. Our world has an awful lot of beauty in it, but is also has its full measure of horror.

Do we then need people to make up their own fictions even worse that what is already? I know that I don’t. Actually, what I know is that I don’t need to see or hear or read those stories. Every person on the earth has full rights and privileges to their ideas, be they dreams or nightmares. If that person wants to even put their image on canvas or celluloid, their story or tape or script, they should be allowed to do that. Ideas alone can do us no harm.

But I reserve full right, as well, to not read that person’s words, to close my ears tot their stories. And you do as well. I chose to see Seven and to read Grapes of Wrath; any problems that these may have caused me are fully of my own choosing. What I do not have full rights and privileges to do is to tell you what you cannot watch and may not hear. Your mind is your own whether you choose to pour into is beautiful tales or horrible pictures.

Lately the debate had come to us on whether our new televisions should have a new microchip to block violent programs from ever reaching us. These V-chips would keeps Cops and GI Jo, old Chuck Norris movies, and undoubtedly Seven from ever showing on the small screen. But already we have a few things that can do this more effectively and less in the fashion of Big Brother. We have remote controls, on-off cottons, and our minds. If I want to see blood and guts, then I should be fully allowed to, and if someday my children want to, then I should be the one to convince them not to. GE shouldn’t; Bob Bole shouldn’t; my neighbors shouldn’t; and neither should you.

But personally I would much rather kick back, pop some popcorn, and see the Roadrunner give Wil E. Coyote a good whack across the head; or maybe pop in a tape and ice the beer when it’s time for some good ole’ butt-kickin’ football. Anything as long as I don’t have to see Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman again…ooh, nightmares…

I've seen the flick once since then, and it's still a very well-made film that reulses me thoroughly. I think I would've liked this ending better.

Sit back and watch today's PowerPoint

From Really Bad PowerPoint (and how to avoid it)

PowerPoint could be the most powerful tool on your computer. But it’s not.

It’s actually a dismal failure. Almost every PowerPoint presentation sucks rotten
eggs. And much of the fault lies with Microsoft.

If you didn't click on that last link - on the ebook above - go back and click on it. It's like five or six pages worth of reading, and it's impressively succinct.

Nearly every PowerPoint presentation you've seen sucks.

Just about all of them suck.

And there is some research that suggests presenting information visually and verbally at the same time overloads listeners so that they're actually less likely to learn anything.

There are ways to fix PowerPoint presentations, and most advice centers around the idea of using more pictures - good, professional pictures - and less text. Some advice suggests that a slide should have no more than six words - no bullets, no subpoints, no nothing. Tell the story verbally, and don't read any part of the slide show. Make sure that your presentation needs you to present it. Otherwise, there's no reason for you to be there; you can just send it out as an attachment.

Even the people who say that the death of PowerPoint is overreported agree that there's a fair bit of work to be done to make PowerPoint good, so I'm challenging you with this question...

What's the last PowerPoint presentation you saw that you would say was a good presentation, one that really informed you or convinced you to think differently?

How They Became the Bomb

GMason hooked me up last week with a cd of his favorites - bit o' Ryan Adams, Moutain Goats, Band of Bees, New Pornographers, Ben Folds Five, LeeVees, and most shockingly How I Became the Bomb.

Normally when I get a burned cd, I throw the lyrics into Google and check what pops up. In searching for tracks 3,4, and 5 of GMason's disc, however, Google was of no help. The lyrics sites didn't hit on anything, and neither di the entirety of the interweb - for two of the three songs, anyway. After a bit of repeated banging away at Google, I bumped into this article about a lil' band from Tennessee called How I Became the Bomb.

Turns out that they're a hell of a band. Great synthesizer/guitar pop songs with lyrics that alternate between hilarious and just freakin' cool.

The band's got one album out - barely available on Amazon, but they're streaming the full album on their homepage and partially on their MySpace page.

I grabbed the picture at the top of this post from the cool Flickr album, and I'm just a cool enough guy to have thrown together everything I could find on Seeqpod for ya.

Check out today's coolest band, How I Became the Bomb.


SeeqPod Music beta - Playable Search

Something seems not right here

I found the above picture in looking through the Reuters Best Photos of the Day for yesterday. it's photo #21 if you go hunting.

The caption that goes with the photo reads thusly:

French lawyers clash with policemen as they protest against a judiciary reform during a visit by the Minister of Justice Rachida Dati in Colmar, eastern France, November 5, 2007. (FRANCE)

REUTERS/Vincent Kessler

I'm all good and well with lawyers protesting. In fact, it's the second photo of the day to show lawyers protesting somewhere in the world, the other being one of Pakistani lawyers (#5 in the slide show) protesting the country's recent crackdown on just about everything that would fall under the banner of freedom.

It's a little weird to see lawyers protesting, sure. And it's a little weird to see folks protesting in gowns or - in the Pakistani photo shown at the bottom of this post - in a suit. But the French lawyer photo just seems to have something else wrong with it. The lawyers all look like they're having a fun time jousting with the police. They're grinning and look like they might even be laughing. One of them is even cheesing for the camera. In another photo from the same event, even the police seem to be grinning and taking the "protest" pretty jovially.

Leave it to the French to screw up a good protest. Sheesh...

Here's the Pakistani lawyer photo, by the by...


Now that's a protest.

or a new dance step...

I am totally going to hell for that last comment, aren't I?

#945!

Just noticed that I'm headed toward 1000 posts fairly soon. This one is #945, and with fifty or so days left in the year, I should cross the barrier about when we get to flip the calendar.

That's either freakin' cool or amazingly pathetic.

Genius!

The Girl is a hell of a cook. She's admittedly a little particular about how she wants thing to go in the kitchen so I tend ot steer clear of her when she's working, but the results are usually impressive so I'm good with stepping off.

She's also not always in the mood to cook, so she's smart enough to take a Sunday every now and again and make twenty burritos or a couple of batches of soup and throw them into the freezer so she can just pull stuff out, thaw it, and go.

Which is what made her choice a couple of weeks ago to go visit Dream Dinners a little odd. She already does pretty much what they were gonna do for her.

See, Dream Dinners is a place where they do all the prep work and you throw the stuff together, take it home, and freeze the meals until you're ready for a "homecooked" meal without a whole lot of work. It's marketed primarily to women (admittedly pretty much only to women) who fall into one of a few categories:

• guilty about not cooking for their families
• don't have time but want to eat family meals
• can't cook worth a crap unless they've got the recipe and somebody to prep all the ingredients
• need to impress somebody but don't know how to cook
• wanna have a social afternoon with friends while throwing some food together

The Girl fell into the last category and went to the Bridgewater Falls branch a couple of weeks ago. She dropped about $130 to make thirty-some servings of food (she claimed it worked out to $3.50 a serving, but my math put it more at $3.75, but who's quibbling) in a couple of hours.

Her take on the layout is that it was incredibly well-planned. (Warning: all following descriptions are second hand from The Girl to me. Any innacuracies are entirely the fault of the blogger.) They had four large stainless steel tables with frozen cases set into the center of the tables (like you'd see at a pizza prep place - a bin for each ingredient). Each table was set up for a different dish (they have a set menu for the month from which you choose in advance what you'd like to make.) Customers/chefs moved from station to staion following recipes already typed out and nicely laminated.

The ingredients went into ziploc bags, disposable aluminum plans, or little plastic containers which were then labeled with specific instructions on pre-printed stickers with the Dream Dinner logo. Everything was ready to be grabbed and ended up ready to be taken from freezer to oven to plate to gullet.

With only a limited amount of data to back up my statement (one dinner in - pork chops with apples) I can say that they make for a pretty tasty product. Tonight's dinner is their stuffed pasta shells with red sauce, so I'll know more by tomorrow.

The Girl's general impression is that the business is an absolute genius move. I had visions of the workers chopping and slicing, measuring and sorting ingredients before the customer chefs got there, but it turns out they don't even do that. They crack open Sysco packages, pour them into prettier dispensers, and put the dispensers into the freezer tables. They make sure there are water bottles in each customer chef's refrigerator space. They print up the labels for the food packages, and that's about it. Everything's straight out of the Sysco package, and it's all measured by the customer chefs.

Overhead's minimal because they only order as much food as they're going to need for the week. The rent's a little pricey because they're primarily going into affluent areas, and they've got some money sunken into nicely appointed kitchens - but even those don't have ovens or stovetops to make anything. She reported that they've got a microwave in the place, but that's pretty much just to thaw things out (or warm up the enchelada wrappers to make them more pliable when she was there) as needed. There's some employee cost, but that's not even a lot because they're not open when they don't have reservations.

Genius!

The Girl did report that she think she could do as good a job for a slightly lower cost and with slightly higher quality ingredients from The Jungle, but that's because she knows what she's doing. Lots of other folks don't have a clue.

There is another place doing the same basic thing at My Girlfriend's Kitchen but aiming a little younger, a little hipper, a little more social with their styling. The Girl has promised a try through there and a report back (to me - she honestly doesn't pay any attention to my literary daliances here on what she refers to as The Blog - don't worry, it doesn't get jealous of her...much...)

So the overall review is a solid four stars out of five...probably five stars out of five if you can't do the stuff on your own...

How should I do it, then?

Things are changing faster than I could ever have imagined.

And yet I teach in about the same way that I taught ten years ago and in a way that wouldn't be entirely foreign to how my dad started teaching forty-three years ago.


To see the video in a larger format (some of the messages are hard to read otherwise), click here.

This is another video from Mike Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and director of some pretty phenomenal and thought-provoking videos over on YouTube - some of which you've probably seen before (in particluar, The Machine is Us.

Thanks, as is quite often the case, to Transbuddha for this one.

Make and remember how to bake

You've got all kind of recipes rolling around in your head, recipes that the world needs to have on hand just in case you were to kick off and let slip this mortal coil.

There's the one where instead of milk you put ice cream with the cereal in the morning.

Or the one where you take a refrigerator biscuit and turn it into a little pizza.

How 'bout when you mixed a can of Chef Boyardee with a batch of Kraft Mac & Cheese?

These culinary masterpieces can't be forgotten. But what're you gonna do to make sure that you get these gastronomic miracles to the wider market?

Make a custom cookbook. Throw down your recipes, mix in a few from a cooking website or two, and drop a few pretty pictures from their archives to make it look all professional.

Get to it, folks.

Instrumental favorites

Apocalyptica "One"

Apocalyptica "Nothing Else Matters"

Dave Brubeck Quartet "Take Five"

Air "Lost in Kyoto"

James Last & Zamphir "The Lonely Shepherd"

Ashley MacIsaac "Devil in the Kitchen"

Yo-Yo Ma prelude to Bach's "Cello Suite #1"

Dick Dale & the Del Tones "Misirlou"

Booker T & the MGs "Green Onions"

the Ventures "Walk Don't Run"

The Allman Brothers "Jessica"

Eddie Van Halen "Eruption / 316"

Eric Johnson "Cliffs of Dover"

Stevie Ray Vaughn "Little Wing"

Duane Eddy "Peter Gunn"

Thanks to digital dream door for the reminder about some of these...

The title of the blog - part 3

As would become a bit of a recurring theme of my column, I was scraping for ideas and decided to take a few cheap shots at a target that couldn't defend itself: the Indianaplis Star, Indy's premier newspaper.

It's a pretty conservative paper, the kind that had (may still have, I dunno) a daily bible verse above the masthead. I'm not all that down with the Christian conservatives, so I made juvenile cracks about their editorial page. As I've learned since then, there are worse editoral pages.

Ah, morning. A bowl of Lucky Charms, my fraternity brothers stumbling about in desperate need of full-length mirrors, and The Indianapolis Star. What more could a man possibly ask for? Outside the Lambda Chi dining room window, the sun is rising, birds are chirping, and sprinklers are wetting down Mud Hollow. Obviously, everything is right with the world. Or so I thought early this morning…

That, though was before I opened up The Indianapolis Star and proceeded to peruse the letters to the editor. I had no idea what sort of black-hearted minions of evil were lurking metaphorically just beyond our front porch steps. That, however, is what I read The Indianapolis Star most every morning.

“Like piglets in a panic that the fat federal sow that they have been suckling on for the past 40 years in going dry, a coalition of liberal special interest groups is descending on 30 cities to protest government reform.” – Jo Cornelison, Richmond

The horror! Can you possibly imagine our government handing out money to anyone why tries to tell them that somewhere a need exists? Why, that would be as absurd to suggest as saying that defense contractors have gotten rich off of a system that basis its usefulness on a balance of terror. I shudder to think. Luckily, though there may yet be some salvation for us.

“Everything needed for the happiness and dignity of all people is contained in Christianity, which I am sure of many religions, which when followed will guide us.” –Dan Logan, Indianapolis

Well, then, as long as I never question my sexual orientation – the opening subject of Mr. Logan’s letter to The Indianapolis Star- and feel enough guilt for my sins, then maybe things will work out after all. But, then again…

“Wherever[Jerry] Garcia went, he was followed by drop-outs and ne’er-do-wells. He caused riots and near riots wherever he went and left jails full and the police departments overworked.” – Gordon Gilmer, City-County Councilman, Indianapolis

At least now we can hope that these social malcontents won’t darken out door preaching their doctrines of peace, love, and harmony. It’s probably all just an insidious plot to let communism get a foothold her, anyway. Luckily, a few readers know how we must be saved.

“My prayer is that the IRS will find out what it’s like to fall into the hands of a mighty God.” – B.J. Ward, Indianapolis

If only this could happen. But our brothers in the Religious Right, this Silent Majority, have their hands tied by a Jeffersonian- and obviously outdated- idea of separation of church and state. We need, however more God in our government and more of both of those in our entertainment. That, perhaps, could protect our children from “the new lewd, crude TV lineup for this fall.” – B.J. Ward, Indianapolis

Now all we have to do is keep our government out of big business as well. In trying to stop teen-age smoking, “the president’s real aim is to kill the cigarette industry through draconian government regulation. And he’s using the kids as a smoke screen…Yes, there have been studies that suggest that kids were influenced by Joe Camel. But those studies were produced by highly biased groups with an anti-smoking agenda.”- Joseph Perkins

Luckily we have the God-fearing, pro-smoking forced already alerted. We wouldn’t was anyone- especially teen-agers- to quit smoking. And these pro-smoking forces are as un-biased as the people who ran studies two score years ago saying that smoking was good for you.

Wow, it was one full morning. Imagine, all of these in one paper, The Indianapolis Star, complete with daily prayer and letters to the editor. I am so thankful for The Indianapolis Star’s morning presence. Without them, my morals would plummet while I didn’t puff away and while I watched a lewd, crude TV show.

“It’s reassuring to know that The Star and The News listens to the average citizens. Keep up the good work.” – Noland Turner, Indianapolis

Andy Roddick could beat me with a brick

Cool book exerpt over on ESPN today. The author of the new book Andy Roddick Beat Me With a Frying Pan was lucky enough to go out and do a bunch of things that sports fans have joked about for years. He played one of the top tennis players in the world - but he made Roddick play with a frying pan instead of a racket. He put a really fat guy in a hockey goal to see if anybody would ever score. He checked how big a lead would he'd need to beat an Olympic sprinter. He tested great darts players in beer pong.

He even put together a team of midgets to see if they'd be the greatest offense in baseball history.

Midgets!

Short people standing next to regular-sized people throwing baseballs.

That's the secret to great literature.

Check out an exerpt over on ESPN's website.

Or buy the book from Amazon.

Or, even better, watch the highlight reel on YouTube and get probably as much joy there as you would from the whole book as they pretty much give away the entire farm in the ten-minute clip.

I'm confused

What's the deal with Martina Hingis?

She's a coke head?

Where'd that come from?

Highlight of a very small portion of the blogsphere

And here's what I've been doing lately...

• Looking at a t-shirt
• Liking the pictures
• Checking on giant Lego zombies
• Being impressed
• Still digging the interweb blagosphere
• Scaring myself with pumpkins
• Digging techno Viking
• Loving Kevin Smith
• Trying to understand
• Enjoying the science
• Trying to figure this out
• Remembering old virals
• Digging the old future
• Looking in the mirror
• Stroking my mustache
• Still being impressed
• Hoping this comes true
• Dropping the ball
• Waiting until 7:35 in the morning
• Grooving to the new header
• Getting some much-needed perspective even if the formatting's off
• Grooving to the dance-off
• Freaking the heck out
• Thinking about waffles

My lexicon is prodigious

I made a brief appearance at level 46 on Free Rice. Then I got surmounted...vanquished...swamped.

Get your word on

It's a fun li'l game - Free Rice....

They show a word and ask what the word means. You pick from the four meanings. Get it right, and you get a harder word next time. Get it wrong, and you get an easier word. After a few words, you get a tally in the bottom right corner telling you your vocab level. More words right, a higher vocab level.

I tend to hover around 40-41 most of the time. If I happen upon the right word or two, I can bounce up to my high score (shown up top) of level 44, but generally I don't make it much higher than a 42 or so.

If you get lots of words wrong, you get down to level one - as shown at the bottom.

And in the process, it generates some donation of rice for folks that can use it. All the donations come via the ads that appear at the bottom of the site. The more you play, the more ads pop up. The more you get right, the bigger the donation. And as far as my research finds, it's connected to poverty.com which seems to be on the up and up.

Yet another novel step toward solving a pretty big problem. Use people's willingness to play games to get some real work done. I've mentioned my digging of this concept before.

Have some fun...do some good...try to avoid this...

What's a guy to do?

On the thirteenth of this month there are two concerts that I'd love to go to...

The Dropkick Murphys - with the Tossers - down at Bogarts and, even cooler, The Mountain Goats at The Mad Hatter across the river.

Or there's the fact that the true likelihood of me going out to a concert on a week night is all but nil, but we'll ignore that fact for now and imagine that I'll actually go to a concert that I want to see but that isn't quite convenient.

Oh, and if you're not a familiar with the groups playing at Bogarts, check this playlist...


SeeqPod Music beta - Playable Search

Or if you're not down with the Mountain Goats, here ya go...


SeeqPod Music beta - Playable Search

Get t' lookin'

I don't know that my dad ever told me how to line up my car mirrors, but now Click and Clack of CarTalk can now help me.

And they can help you, too.

Morphing on YouTube

Godley & Creme's "Cry" - the first examples of morphing that I'd seen


Women in film


Women in Art


Aw, morphing kittens


Michael Jackson's morphing faces


Schick commercial, circa 1993


Pretty girls morphing one into the other


Very, very slow morphing


Pugs morphing...also very cute


Psychadelic alphabet morphing


Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie back and forth


Morphing mustangs


Aging via morph


Black and white morphing


Old school footage of a morph


From Michael Jackson's "Black and White" video


Apparently morphing technology has become a little too commonplace


Now we're down to getting crap like this

The title of the blog - part 2

There are very few choices that I've made in my life that have shaped me in quite the same way that my decision to go overseas for my junior year at Wabash. The Girl had gone to France for a year after high school (we were dating before that and kept faithful to each other while she was gone), and after she got back I spent half a year feeling inferior, less cosmopolitan than she until she sent me packing that next Thanksgiving break.

I spent the rest of that school year moping around and gaining weight. Luckily I was headed to Scotland for the next school year, and I sure as heck wasn't going to head over there (to a college campus, a real city with girls) as fat as I'd let myself get. So I spent the summer playing tennis two hours a day, eating right, and building that destination up into a pretty big thing in my head.

Luckily for me, it lived up to every bit of everything that I had hoped for.

I am who I - in my mind, at least - to a large extent because of that year. I was free to craft whatever personality I wanted - those folks didn't know me. I could party, I could be wild and crazy, I could be academic, I could be thoughful, I could be introspective. It was a fresh start. And I figured out just what kind of person I wanted to be. It took a bit of playing around to figure it out, but I think I got a good idea.

And in my second column for The Bachelor, I chose to encourage the other guys on campus to do the same.

Go. Leave. Get the hell out of Dodge and don’t look back. This may be your only change to leave before you get trapped, stuck forever. So you don’t damn well better take advantage of it. I did, and I know I’m the better for it.

Last year, for the first time in my life, I did leave – the country. I’m a Hoosier by birth, and until September 13th, 1994, I had stayed most all of my life in my home state: first in New Albany and now here. On that day I stepped aboard a flight bound for Detroit. From there my journey continued, landing me eventually in my new home, Aberdeen.

My flight across the Atlantic took eight long hours, but that first step that took me onto my plane to Detroit was even bigger. I know New Albany and Crawfordsville. I knew nothing of Aberdeen. That first step took me away from friends and family for nine months – away from Turkey Run, spring thunderstorms, and backyard basketball. But it gave me Seaton Park, snow in Vienna, and a new meaning for football. I saw a sunrise over the North Sea, and I saw a whole new horizon open up for me.

The light first began to show slowly, bringing the beach into dim focus, and I first saw that horizon at the beginning of my sophomore year. Professor Beck told my German class of his college travels to Germany, and suddenly I knew I had to see Europe, I’d been in the dark there on the beach, and I had before seen what lay ahead of me for my junior year.

With a bit more light, I could see the ocean receding from me, the sand taking temporary domain back from the sea. I saw just how far I could go and still be safe. I probably could have gone further than Aberdeen and still been safe, but I didn’t know that until I met Nancy Doemel at the Off-Campus Study fair two Octobers ago. She told me of her program that would fit my major and satisfy my major needs. The ocean looked cold that morning, but my prospects were starting to warm up.

The light grew until I could see other people down the beach form me, plating volleyball and having what sounded like a great time. Once I’d decided upon Aberdeen people I knew who had been there began to seek me out – offering advice, congratulating me, envying me. I even met someone who would be in Aberdeen with me. I wasn’t alone on that beach, nor would I be alone on the shore of the North Sea for those nine months.

Then came the anticipation. The clouds were few and far between. The sky was incredible, waiting for the sun to break the waterline and bathe the whole city behind me in a brilliant, liquid gold. All summer long I waited for my chance to see Aberdeen. I packed and waited, then I stepped onto the airplane. Then I flew and waited, not knowing what I would see when we touched down in Glasgow, when the sun finally shone in full brilliance.

And then there was light. There was a golden-pink sun, a brilliant sea, and another glorious day. There were new friends in Aberdeen. There were castles filled with history and mystery, and there were sunrises like this one.

I want you to have your own moments like that morning to me and there’s no day in hell that you can have them in Crawfordsville. Our Wabash does an excellent job educating us in its ways, but so many more lessons yet to be learned lie beyond our insular, friendly confines. Perhaps you want to walk in the foothills of Kilimanjaro or sift through the ashes of ancient Pompeii or stand triumphant atop Ayers Rock I want you to know that you can do just that. All you have to do is realize that the sun rises differently every day and for every one of us.

You need, however, to start thinking and talking and planning now. Wabash isn’t going to let more than a third of your class leave campus hen it’s your turn. You have to prove to them that you deserve to go more than the fifty other losers who applied for your place. That means that you have to know what you’ll take, where you want to go, and – above all- why.

But they want to send you, honestly they do. John Fischer, Bill Placher, Frank Howland, and the rest of the off-campus study committee all want to let you chase those dreams. Talk to them now; they will help you convince them; they’ll help you to pick where to go. But you’d better hurry up, because once this article gets out there, no telling how quickly their offices will fill up.

I wish you luck…enjoy your travels…and don’t forget to write…

From somewhere

Sadly, folks, I can't link to the web comic that this comes from because the series is largely school-inappropriate. This one, however, is perfect and should be on every one of my chemistry tests from now until eternity.

And if you really want to know where it comes from, ask Grace or email me off-blog. It really is worth reading, and I'll happily tell any non-student or at least non-current student.

And here's a second one just to tempt you further.