The "were" is Subjunctive

Did I ever tell you about Food-Eating Guy? He sometimes sat next to me in my 10am programming class last semester, and he always ate. I mean, he'd eat continuously through class. That's kind of annoying, but what pushed it over the edge was what he'd eat. On a typical day, he'd have most of the following:

Canned pineapple (he'd bring his own can opener)
Canned tuna (see "Canned pineapple" above) (he would also drink the leftover tuna juice)
Candy
Raisins
Pasta
Cole slaw

and he'd wash it down with 2 or 3 juice boxes.

I'm no monster, so I certainly considered the possibility that he was hypoglycemic. I asked him as much, and he told me that he wasn't hypoglycemic; he would eat in class because he forgot to eat at home.

Every Tuesday and Thursday?

Right.

Anyway, here's fun: Today Food-Eating Guy sat next to me in Statistics. Statistics is at 11:30am; presumably he'd already had his morning smorgasbord by this time. Indeed, he did not eat. Sadly, I learned there is more to Food-Eating Guy than eating in class; there is also relaxing in class. How does Food-Eating Guy relax in class?

He takes off his shoes.

And then he takes off his socks.

And he just sits there.

Next to me.

I think it might have been my karmic punishment for not enjoying the chocolate buffet more than I did -- assuming karma were fast-acting, of course.

Chocolate buffet

I hate to say it, but the chocolate buffet was a little disappointing. The highlight of the buffet was the chocolate fountain, but you can buy one of those for home use. You don't need a permit or anything!

See?

Free(ish) t-shirts!

http://www.printfection.com/promo/free_tshirts.php


For the cost of shipping (to Canada, it's $6.20 USD) they'll put any image you want on a white t-shirt. And then, y'know, send it to you.

I don't know what the catch is -- maybe the shirts are of low quality, or maybe the entire thing is a Mob front, who knows? -- so I used my for-spam-only address.

For me, pie will do in a pinch

I fully expect Jillian to perform this monologue at her birthday party this Friday.

Furthermore, I fully expect someone to record it and send it to WFMU so that Kenny G can air it on his show next week.

Oh, not that Kenny G, by the way. The other one. The occasionally naked one.

This "group project" business is getting out of hand

I spent fifteen hours in the Spinks lab this weekend, working on two different group projects for my classes. I'd complain about it, but it's more work than I do during the week, so "fifteen hours on the weekend" is another way of saying "instead of fifteen hours during the week".

To people in my group projects who may have read that: Pretend you didn't.

Because of my professors' fondness for PowerPoint slides, I take notes in only one of my classes; the other classes are when I get my prime daydreaming done. Last week's daydreams included: a mud-wrestling match between two of the girls I'm kinda sweet on; trying to figure out which WFMU bumpersticker would look best on the car I don't own yet; and reminiscing about my interview at the Sheaf.

For reasons best left unexplored, I applied for the position of Production Manager at the Sheaf. Maybe I'm just tired of seeing my corrections not get corrected, or maybe it's the desire to be paid; I don't know. When they asked me why I wanted the job, I gave some bullshit answer which I can only assume they saw through but accepted anyway. I mean, why would anybody want to do any job at a student paper? "My career goals include laying out small publications every week." Clearly.

The interview was fun, though. In my cover letter, I'd made three mentions of the importance of "hot single chicks" on next year's staff. I was worried they'd bring that up -- cover letters are tricky that way -- but it wasn't mentioned until the "Do you have questions for us" part of the interview. I came right out with it: "Since I'm your first interviewee, I guess it's too soon to ask about the hot single chicks, right?" (Sadly, it was.)

It was amusing to field the interviewers' questions about hypothetical situations involving group dynamics. After all the group work I've done this year, and all the crazy garbage that
I've seen, my answers came down to "Let me tell you about group work ... "

The only problem I can foresee with this Sheaf job (though I haven't been notified, I'm pretty sure the job's mine) is that the paper publishes four times over the summer. This means that I'll have to spend four weekends in Saskatoon this summer, which is considerably more than the ideal number of weekends (ie, zero). The Super Road Trip may have to involve an emergency stop in Saskatoon -- that's just another thing I can daydream about in class.

Later, I got pants. Gray pants. Nice pants.

I went shopping with Colleen on Friday. I went looking for a laptop desk and found a chocolate fondue fountain. (Or maybe the fountain found me? I'm not always clear on this "fate" business.) Sadly, at $99 the chocolate fondue fountain is going to have wait until Christmas. (Or boredom. I'm much clearer on this "shopping makes the sad go away" business.)

Ultimately I bought a can of mixed nuts.

Helpful cashier: "Do you need a bag?"
Me: "No, these go in my tummy."

"Your mommma's so short, you can see her feet on her driver's license picture."

Instead of staying in and watching Crash, I went out and saw Dave Chappelle's Block Party. Oh, it was ever good. It was like the hip-hop/R&B version of Wattstax, even though I've never seen Wattstax.

Hey, I haven't seen Ray or Walk the Line either, but I feel no compunction in calling Walk the Line "the white man's Ray". Why let facts cloud your observations? And why not let a smile be your umbrella? As long as it doesn't rain on your parade, it's all good.

Yeah, I'm out of weather metaphors.

On board he's the captain, so climb aboard

There are a few things wrong with this auction for a wax replica of Gavin MacLeod:

1) They won't ship it after it's been won [by me].

2) They have no idea what kind of treasure they've got on their hands here -- the estimate is "$1.00 - $1,000,000.00". Hey, thanks.

3) The starting bid is kinda steep when compared to this replica of a Rameses II statue and this replica of Chairy. Damn! $50? That's just insane, even if you're just buying it not as replica memorabilia, but as furniture (which would be my motivation).

4) Cap'n Stubing is the only Love Boater up for auction. Without a Julie or Gopher or Isaac the Bartender, your only fantasy playtime option is to bring the captain onstage with you at open mike night and perform "Come Sail Away". Admittedly, it'd be a kickin' rad performance piece, but there's only so many times you can do that before you'd become known as "the Love Boat fetish guy".

4a) I guess you could also perform the theme from Love Boat. Oddly enough, I hadn't thought of that. See, that's why you're the performance artist and I'm not.

Fig. 1: Gavin MacLeod was also on an episode of "Oz".
Thankfully, I don't have an "Oz" costume for him to wear.

Captain Catchphrase strikes again!

Oh, this is fun:

The Sheaf, the U of S student newspaper for which I act as "[Volunteer] Copy Editor", has gotten in trouble with Christian-types for publishing the following cartoon:

Fig. 1: I go away for two weeks and this is what they publish.

Personally, I don't like the cartoon because it's little more than a not-terribly-funny ballpoint doodle. I couldn't give a rat's ass about Messiah-on-anthropomorphic-pig sex acts. But that's neither here nor there.

Today I went in for my regular copy editing. Hoo-boy, was the newsroom ever fun today. Emails, angry or supportive, were pouring in and the Production Manager had no time to lay out the paper because he was constantly on the phone with various media outlets -- he had been appointed Acting Editor-in-Chief because the regular E-in-C had been pressured to resign the night before.

Of course, since the Production Manager hadn't had time to lay out the paper, that meant a lot of downtime for a [Volunteer] Copy Editor. I took the opportunity to help the other editors put together their letter of apology. My contribution? The cartoon ran as a result of "editorial inattentiveness".

Oh, I hope that stays in. It's just the sort of thing I can see catching on. It's from the same school as "wardrobe malfunction", but it's all mine. And admittedly not as good. But still mine.

And really, if this whole thing isn't about me, then I don't know what is.

Everything is ... ok?

I switched webhosts yesterday, and I think the final stages were completed today. All this means is that I'm once again able to receive email at my superstar [at] dybushnell [dot] com address, and that with the huge increase in storage, I can host video files.

Of course, since I don't have any video files to post at the moment, I look like a giant tool. Of course!

EDIT: Rats. Some of the images show up and some don't. It's too late in the evening and I'm too sick to want to wade through my ftp directory, so you'll have to pretend to see the old images (thoughtfully captioned by me) for next little while.