Some sentances

I got a new job working for the department of fish and wildlife watching plants grow in the remnant prairies of Mississippi. Soon I will be back at Osbourne working in the hot sun. We got a dog, her name is Punkin. She is a real sweetie. I watched Borat last week and was infuriated. If I had had known twenty years ago that you could gross 26 million dollars filming yourself acting like a complete jackass, I would have retired a long time ago...

woof woof

Things are going well. I have completed work for two of my four classes, Compooters and Urban Planning. I think I did well in these classes. I did not do so well in my History class, since I got an F on my hanky-code paper. She actually had the gall to write “from beginning to end, the most imbecilic load of crap I have encountered in twenty-three years of teaching.” I have decided to have her fired. There was a bit of a personal setback over the weekend, I got kicked out of the German class end of the semester party, which I spent for the most part shirtless, swilling Jaegermeister from the bottle and shouting “WER HAT DIE HUNDE RAUS?” Later someone told me that it would have been more correct to say “Wer liesst die Hunde aus.” I tried to argue that my way was more colloquial, that the participle gelassen could be inferred from the context. Then I realized that I was actually arguing with a floor lamp. I splashed some water on my face and pulled myself together and drove the little woman down to the lawyer’s office to close on a turn-of the century bungalow we have decided to buy. It will be a nice little project for us over the summer, fixing this property up. It is going to need a furnace installed, new wiring and one interior wall removed. And a few other things: new floor all around, new interior paint, and a few more odds and ends. New ceilings, a few new plumbing fixtures, and screen in the back porch. That’s about it. And a new roof, driveway, back steps and foundation drain. It’ll keep us out of trouble for a while.

More Osbourne Prairie

Here is a shot of the Osbourne Priaire's gullys, the calcified ancient seabed and banks of cedar and grasses. A really cool spot.

Osbourne Prairie

Our plant systems class met for the last time today. Went to the Osbourne Priarie, north of town on Section 16 Road. A calcerous gully, blinding white, where the topsoil has been washed away to reveal the chalky remnants of cretaceous-era coral. The gullies are littered with 65-million-year-old mussel and clam shells, old tires, rusty cans, panicum grass, blue-eyed grass, and lots and lots of cedars. In areas where the cedars are dense there are pines and even some oaks and dogwoods. I saw jack-in-the pulpet, two box turtles, and some new ones for me, setenium aromaticum, or tooth-ache tree, which has some sort of mouth-numbing properties (I did not experiment) and a golden colored flower called Hoarey Pacoon. I did not bring my camera, and had to take these with a cell phone. I did not identify any of the plants in these shots, if anyone wants to take a stab at it, be my guest. One of them I think is a 1970s era Magnavox showing the botany channel.

Score!

Got dinner on the table by six! My hanky-code research paper is ready for bed! On the way home from class I found a complete set of twist-ties that had escaped from a box of garbage bags!

Nose to the grindstone

I have not been able to post today because I have been working hard on this research paper: “Is that a bandana? Gay Bar Hanky Codes of the Reagan Era.” You wouldn’t think that such a paper would even be relevant for a student in the landscape architecture department, but, since the hanky codes had such regional variation, there is a topographical element at play in the matrix. I am working on my map overlays, color coded for each year of the Reagan administration, mostly focusing on established gay neighborhoods in San Francisco, NYC and Colorado Springs. Research is difficult because much of the source information has been lost. We are talking about an oppressed subculture here after all. Some dominant themes hold together on both coasts, however, and my analysis of the color associations (at times obvious, at times devilishly ironic) is brilliantly conjoined with color theory as it relates to graphic design issues in all aspects of the human experience. The paper topic was almost rejected by my professor, who questioned its overall relevance. I accused her of homophobia and went to the department head and soon I was back in business. Nobody’s gonna shut me up.

John Edwards is done

Nothing alienates the little guy like a $400 haircut. When will these pols learn that the 12 dollar haircut at the local barber pays you back a thousand votes through cred-factor over the dozens you loose by looking less-than-beautiful. Christ, the whole reason I go to the barber to get crappy haircuts is so that I can connect with the common man. Check out: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070418/ap_on_el_pr/edwards_hair_10

the mansion with ten bathrooms wasn't exactly improving his man-of-the-people shtick anyway...

rough day

Rough day today. A friend of my wife's was teaching a German class at a University, just like my wife does four days a week, and somebody walked in and shot him in the head, then shot everybody in class. It seems that only one student survived, by playing possum, and his story is the only eyewitness version of the actual shootings at Virginia Tech that is online right now. As everybody knows by now, the assailant went from there and killed a lot more people. We knew the German instructor and his wife back in NC, very nice people. A very sad day.

seen around campus

Here is something I see every time I pass by a certain dormitory on my way to campus. Let me say right off the bat (heh heh) that I am glad to see that today's youth are taking good care of their things. When I was of that age, many of my friends and myself included could not be counted on to properly maintain our own bodies. Proper maintenance of an automobile was a click or two beyond our horizon as well. We could restring a guitar, grill fresh tuna and grind our own coffee, but if the household paddling board needed a fresh coat of paint, we were, and I hate to say it, a pretty hopeless bunch. Paddling in those days was not as refined as it is now, and I think I can speak for most of the slackers of Chapel Hill in the eighties on this, we generally just grabbed whatever was handy. So I commend these new millenials and the respect they have for their implements of recreational corporal punishment. I do take issue, however, with their blatent disregard for university property. I would like to say that I would have at least put down a layer of newspaper or perhaps a T-shirt or two to protect the threshold of my dormitory (which, as a threshold, says a lot about those who dwell therein), but of course I can not say such a thing with certainty. Had it been me, honestly, I would have stepped across this very doorstone on my way to class every day and attributed the mess to one of many made in sacrifice to art.

Getting up to speed

I have been trying like hell to follow this whole Don Imus thing and I was about to give up. If you listen to clip, the other guy says "hardcore hos," yet nobody is talking about him. The whole thing is really about the hair. Then I saw a photo of Imus' own intimidating mane and things became clearer. As a man who has struggled with hair issues on a daily basis since puberty, I became more attuned to the pain. I remember listening to Imus back in Raleigh where I could get it, and I never could figure it out. Today I gave up and started to research the Sanjaya controversy. Now there is one bodacious head of hair. And that little girl, Ashley Ferg, who cried on the show, was on all the morning shows the next day. Man, I totally missed that. She has a wikipedia article now, though it is about to get deleted, or merged with Sanjaya's article. I saw Cornel West holding forth on Imus this morning and, after I got to the bottom of the Sanjaya thing, I spent the remainder of the afternoon watching Cornel West speeches on Youtube. That is one mesmerizing brutha. Oh the things we can do when we should be working...

media watch

The other day somebody told me that Cormac McCarthy was going to be on Oprah and I dismissed it. "Bless your heart," I said, "somebody is pulling your leg! It's an April Fool's joke!" The next day the notion popped into my head, and I almost thought the whole thing had been a dream. Just to make sure, I went to cormacmccarthy.com and, sure enough...

There was in interesting post in a forum at cormacmccarthy.com. Somebody copied a post from a forum at Oprah's book club in which the writer was quite agitated at the fact that Oprah had chosen McCarthy's The Road as a book of the month. Why? Well, last month's book was The Secret, all about the secret to life. And you know what the secret to life is? What you think becomes real, so think good thoughts! Well, now everyone is going to think about a bleak, hopeless Apocolyptic landscape and some sort of metaphor of pointless striving, and it is going to come true!

On a related note, I don't think Don Imus should be fired, but I can't understand why anybody listens to him.

Got to get back to making the magic happen...