1. English expatriates who lock themselves outside of their homes in a dressing gown are typically very polite, and you should lend them your cellular phones so that they can call for help, even if their puppies try to teethe on your limbs. You'll feel good about yourself, and you'll have an excuse to ogle an English expatriate in their dressing gown.
2. Computer programming is very easy to do, so long as you don't care about doing it well. This is because computers are typically even more clueless than you are. They don't know what the fuck is going on. They'll do anything you say. They're like Vietnamese houseboys. I know this because I just wrote a completely pointless computer program in MATLAB, that solves the Laplace equation via Jacobi iterations on a rectangle subject to arbitrary boundary conditions. It's so simple even an engineer could do it. It's so simple even I could do it. I don't really have any use for this thing myself, being a topologist, but at least it draws some pretty pictures. And it (hopefully) meets one of my Ph.D. requirements. Here is one pretty picture, which looks like some kind of flappy beast. Here is another, which is more of a magic carpet. And here is a third, which is clearly a tarantula.
3. Owls really can spin their heads around like in The Exorcist. I don't think their heads are actually attached to their bodies at all. I wouldn't be surprised if they could send them floating off into the forest independently like feathery balloons to spy on their enemies. Owls like to give you superior stares. I attempted to communicate with two of them in the only avian language I know, Turkie Gobble. They did not reply. They merely gave me one of Those Looks, and then one of them pooped. I took this as a sign of contempt, but the ways of owls are strange to me. For all I know this could be how they show amusement, much like Karl Rove. (Never tell Karl Rove a joke. He'll shit on everything. Furniture, walls, Jeff Gannon, everything. I hear this from anonymous sources highly placed inside the White House. Everything I say is true.)
Posted by aloysius at May 14, 2006 09:04 PM |