Look Closely....

Just a quick one for now. Earlier this semester, I was working for Hillel a a mashgiach and a server at one of their events. I ended up in the paper, as shown here: The only problem was that the Cornell Daily Sun got the caption wrong. The person I am serving is misnamed and her graduating year is off by at least one year. Therefore, I took it upon myself to rectify this egregious error. Here's the result: Also, in an unrelated story, our house has started a blog. I'm not sure what'll come from it, if anything, but it could be interesting.... UPDATE: That blog is defunct, having gone nowhere. However, they recently started a new photoblog. Check out the CJL photoblog.

Wheelin' and Dealin'

I don't have too much particularly interesting material from recent weeks due to being somewhat distracted and/or communicating with a superintelligent piece of lint and/or being locked in the trunk of a 1978 Chevy somewhere outside of Poughkeepsie (long story. Don't ask.) But not to worry, as things are calming down / I'm sober / I got out and hitched a ride with this nice (though somewhat...aromatic) trucker. His name is Francis, and we are now fast friends. In any case, I do have an as-yet-unpublished tale of my first traffic ticket. Yes, I have a car. She is called Charlene, and she has served me well. But this is not her story, as she was not the steed upon which I rode. Nay, I rode a lesser beast, known in most circles as a "bicycle." That's right. I got a ticket while riding my bike. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Bicycles and I have a love-destroy relationship. I brought a bicycle up to hilly Ithaca in the beginning of my Freshman year. It was a 13-year-old artifact, but it was in good condition and fairly functional. By the end of the year, having ridden it about a mile a day, straight through the frigid, snow-laden winter, it was, shall we say, in less than perfect repair. Had I been asked to testify before a court of law on the nature of the construction materials of the bike, I'd have to answer "Rust and duct tape. And maybe a tire." More specifically, the seat was mostly covered in/made of duct tape, one pedal had come off, leaving only a metal rod, and the back brakes were no longer functional, making my preferred method of stopping some combination of using my front brakes, slamming my feet into the ground, and driving into snowbanks. But the bell I'd installed still worked, so thank God for small favors. (This way, I could warn people before I ran them over - note the aforementioned lack of back brakes.) Yes, I realized that it was somewhat dangerous. I'd been warned; I believe the phrase that the guy at the bike shop used was "death trap." In sum, though I try to ride safely, and I wear a helmet, I don't always treat my bicycles with the respect necessary to keep them out of the "death trap" category. Which is why, when I was pulled over by a cop on a Spring evening last year, my bike's front-mounted light was broken. Though this bicycle was a new one, it also had broken back brakes, a fact which the cop (let's call him "Officer Fancy Pants") failed to notice. But he did not fail to notice the fact that I had no working light, or that I (courteously, I thought) pulled into the left lane to allow his car to pass, or that it (presumably) had been a slow crime day. He interrogated me as if I were a gun-wielding, baby-orphan-killing, jaywalking cocaine seller, accusing me of, among other things, a lack of respect for the law. Well, yeah; I don't respect it. Not if it's going to cause me to get a ticket for bike-riding, which it turns out it did. I mean, doesn't he have frat parties to shut down, and parking tickets to issue or something? I gave my information to Officer F. Pants in a daze, as he wrote up the ticket, not pausing to think that he had no way to verify any information I was giving him. After all, you don't need to have any form of ID on your person while practicing the seedy crime-filled art of bikery. So I took the ticket bewilderedly, ready to go to court, when Officer Pants offered me one glimmer of hope, in a world bereft of justice and free ice cream for all. With the type of felony I had committed, if the owner gets the bike fixed, and then gets to a cop to sign a form verifying this, before sundown on the next day, he is exonerated. (I was a bit confused about that time limit. It sounded a bit too, um, magic-spellish: "If thou doth get the Signature of Power by the setting of the sun in one day's time, you can lift the Curse of the Ridiculous Ticket...." You know, something like that.) I decided, what the heck, replaced the light, and brought the improved bicycle (still sans back brakes, mind you) to the police station on campus. And - guess what? - I got the signature I needed. ("And lo, it came to pass that the Curse of the Oppressive Fancy Pants was lifted and the younglings pranced and frolicked once again, except for little Johnny, 'cause he's not really into the whole prancing/frolicking scene, not that there doth be anything wrong with that....") Later, I would go on to deliver the form to the judge who was handling the ticket, wrapping up this case nicely. As I left the police station that day, the world looked just a little brighter. Riding my bike away, I broke at least two traffic laws. It felt good.

Back upfront

Back. Will post soon. Promise Till then, here's what's up.

The 'I don't have time to post' Post

I have a bunch of new posts lined up, but before I can type 'em up and post them, I have a "few" things to do:

• ECON Prelim (hopefully, I passed)
• COMS 330 Design Document for a large-scale database system that may take over my life and/or explode some time around late November.
• STS 355 essay - 3-5 pages on 19th century computers, and how they give me warm gooey feelings inside. (I still have to check whetber the bits I wrote at 4 A.M. are logical, or even coherent. I may be taking bets on that one.)
• Statistics Prelim (not too painful, but those are the ones to watch out for...)
• COMS 330 Homework.
• Run around, wildly flailing my arms about and yelling at squirrels.
  (I also did a bit of general primal screaming for good measure.)
• Statistics problem set (well, I turned something in...)
• COMS 474 project, where I have to teach a stupid computer what the stupid word "activate" means. Stupid. I finally got it done, with what I thought were a bunch of errors. it turns out that those errors are not errors, but difficulties that everyone has in making a word-sense disambiguation system. I did ok.
• Write beatnik poetry for the religious college student Here it is:

  Must repent. The end is nigh. Problem sets? I go to a Godless university. Sigh.

• Repent.

Arrggh.

Business (Cards) as Usual

I designed these a few months ago and ordered 500 through vistaprint.com. Ask me, if you want one - I have a lot to spare:

Oh, and if you were wondering, ephebiphobia is "an abnormal and persistent fear of teenagers."

They've Got a Way With B-O-L-O-G-N-A

True story. A few months ago, I was in Scranton, PA (Motto: "We're not stupid enough to be coal miners...anymore."), visiting family friends with my family. I woke up Saturday morning, and I was laying in bed, and I asked my brother the following question: "If your bologna really did have a first name, and, like, you knew it, then would you really be willing to eat it?" I believe he was speechless. (And for those of you who have no clue what I'm talking about, look here. Cretins.)

Info

Just a little FYI. I actually started posting seriously on my less inane blog, On One Foot, so check it out. Also, if any of you guys (all 5 of you!) want to get informed of when I update, try using the "subscribe to bloglines" button on the right. It's easy to sign up, and by doing so, you'll make the world a better place to live in. For me.

Grin and Bare It

It's time to go back in the hazy mists of time to the days when men were men and women were women and cantaloupes were really these advanced beings from Jupiter sent to either destroy all life as we know it or pick up an extra-large Blizzard ^TM at Dairy Queen. (It's currently unclear; our translators are working on it.) In any case, I recall way back in March, that it was Purim, the Jewish holiday of gift-giving, sillines, and, depending on who you ask, either drunken revelry, or sober reflection on how you don't really have to get drunk and how we're missing the point anyway. I was on Spring Break and I went up to the Penn to visit some friends for an extended weekend, and...well, the details are a bit hazy, but everyone assures me that I had a great time and that the nuns aren't pressing charges. So all in all, it was good times. Shortly after that, I returned to chilly Ithaca, and Hillel had a masquerade party. The party was to take place after Shabbat, and while I'd decided earlier that I would attend, I still had no costume that morning. Yes, I suppose I could go without a costume, but I would hate to break a habit of simply being in fine form. Then it hit me. (Don't worry; I recovered.) Why not just go without any clothes on? I mean, dressing up is mostly just about dressing as someone else. In this case I'd be dressing up like a nudist, (or a newborn baby - take your pick.) Or...maybe not a nudist, but a flasher! Yes! My costume could involve not only nudity, but action as well! After Shabbat, I set to work. I had a trenchcoat already, and I realized that wearing my dress shoes with no socks on accentuated my beautiful unclad legs. So I was done from the neck down. Then, to round it out, I borrowed a sketchy hat from one friend, and some apt sunglasses from another. I was set. I had only to go out to the party and expose myself. I know what a lot of you are thinking. "Ilan? You did WHAT?! You've GOTTA be kidding me." (Except for you, Charlie. You're probably thinking "Cheese. What if I was made of cheese?" But you're special, Charlie.) Your incredulity is justified, I must admit, but sometimes, a man has to do what a man has to do, and sometimes those two men are really one and the same. I went to the masquerade, and I gloriously threw open my coat in front of crowds, and while I did not win the costume contest due to blatant favoritism and/or disgust, man, was it liberating. For the benefit of our younger viewers, and in case I ever want to run for a public office higher than Assistant Dogcatcher, I have only included the "before" picture here in plain view. But for those few voyeuristic readers who just need to see it, look here for what's behind the trenchcoat. Don't forget to zoom in!

Back, and better than ever!

Any Superman fans out there? So do you remember how he died, then was gone for a while, then came back, only more powerful than before? Well, the same sort of thing has happened to me. only I don't wear tights. Not in public, anway. But I am more powerful than before. Scary, isn't it? In any case, I've been a busy bee. First of all, as you can see below, I've migrated all of the old posts from the xanga site to here, right down to the comments. Everything you need should be available through this domain, so to those of you with blogs, change your links. So what have I been up to, you ask? Well, quite a bit, as I will likely discuss in future posts. Let's see...so I'm back in Ithaca, and surprisingly happy about it. Aside from taking a class, I'm working on a super-cool project in Human-Computer Interaction group at cornell. (Take a sec to look at their logo. Yes, it is a little stick figure with a squiggly line to a box, presumably representing a high-tech computer. Apparently, not only is the Information Science department on the cutting edge in HCI, but also in squiggly-line development technologies. My theory is that at some point they needed a logo, and someone drew out this one, likely on a napkin. And then they forgot about it. Silly researchers.) We're developing a nifty little system to help directionally impaired people such as myself find their way around Cornell's sprawling rural campus. I do not know how to tell if a campus is sprawling or not, but Cornell's campus definitely sprawls. It sprawls the begeezus out of Columbia's campus. The system, using GPS and wireless technology, will show a person using a palm computer or a smart phone where he/she is on a campus map. In addition, it will direct users to "hidden collections," such as the kinematic model collection or the brains collection. Supposedly, the brains collection, a set of (disembodied) human brains, are the possession of the Department of Psychology, though I was under the impression that psychologists studied living brains. If my suspicions are correct, the brains really belong to Cornell's Department of Necromancy and Zombie-Related Activity (NeZRAc), but let's just keep that between you and me. So I think that brings you up to date, with the big things at least. I'll give you some of the little things here and there, which much more regularity than once every four months. Oh, and one more thing. If you haven't yet noticed, I've started a second blog, one which will be for more serious stuff - my musings (some Jewish, some not) and maybe a bit of poetry. I have a couple of poems up there, but look for a real introductory post there in the nearish future. Before I sign off, in the interest of full discretion, I should make a few rather important clarifications. I intentionally do not follow the style of many bloggers, who frequently link to humorous or interesting pieces scattered throughout the web and in other blogs. For the time being, at least, I have dedicated myself to bringing you a set of somewhat more original humor than your average blog. Which is not to say that I don't occansionally borrow other writers' styles, but that's an altogether more acceptable and clever form of plagiarism. And being clever is what counts. But the material on this site is original, to the benefit of both the reader and my ego. Which brings me to my next point. This blog, this whole hours-consuming enterprise, is merely an elaborate attempt to boost my ego. As the third of three children, as the kid picked last in gym, as the kid who (no kidding) was fed worms and put in the dryer by his older siblings, it's time to fight back aginst a world which has ignored me and all it has to offer me for too long. I am self-possessed, hear me roar! This blog is for my ego. That is its purpose. The more people read it, the better I feel about myself. I suspect that this is true of many blogs out there, but I am coming out and saying it. You, my readers, are here for my amusement, for my enjoyment. Dance, monkeys, dance! Ah, this is the life. If only these tights didn't chafe so much.

Links For You

In violation of my long-standing policy of only posting my own original entertainment, and not links to any sort of other entertainment, nor (God forbid) anything truly worthwhile, I present you, dear readers, (all 10 of you) with a link to a rather worthy cause from my friend Alisha:

http://lishhh.blogspot.com/2005/03/mishloach-manot-and-tzedakah.html

In return, I believe I have full rights to take her firstborn child or her first million dollars - whichever comes first.

And when you're done with that, and want some entertaining Purim material, head on over to a site made by dear friends of mine, www.onlytzaras.com. Yes, it's everything you were afraid of. Just go with it.