Zhanga: March 2007
Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.
Thursday, March 22, 2007 (3 comments)
I found this on Slashdot... it had me laughing for a good while, so I thought I'd share:
Sex is like bridge. You don't need a partner if you have a good hand.
11:33AM
Monday, March 19, 2007 (3 comments)
You know how in China, you can't walk down a street without being hassled by random merchants trying to peddle their goods?
I was walking down the plaza about half an hour ago, when I was stopped by some girl at a table. This is the conversation we had, I kid you not:
Girl: Hi! Do you support the human race?
Me: I'm sorry...... WHAT is this?
Girl: My sorority is organizing a walk to end racism
and bigotry... [other crap that I pretended to listen to]
She was all excited and cheerful and smiling, and I wasn't really awake so I wasn't even fully coherent. I think it would have been funny to videotape and rewatch. Seriously though, do I support the human race? Guilting people into donating to broadly encompassing, vaguely defined causes is not nice.
This reminds me of last week when I was at KMart. They were sponsoring some sort of compaign to help babies of some sort (deformed babies maybe? I forgot). As I was checking out, the cashier asked me if I would like to donate to help babies. I said no thanks, and she goes, "Why don't you love babies?" She kept talking and eventually I got annoyed and just left.
It's not a donation if I'm paying to buy away guilt. That's a purchase.
Buying away guilt reminds me of a study I read a while back. Basically, you have some daycares where parents are required to pick kids up by a certain time, but the parents are often late. The study lasted twenty weeks. For the first four weeks, the researchers passively counted how many parents were late. The average was 8 late parents per week. In the fifth week, they instituted a small fine for parents who were late more than 10 minutes. Soon thereafter, parents were late an average of 20 times a week. Apparently, they were more than willing to pay the fine to buy away their guilt for being late. (If you're wondering, the study took place in Israel, and the fine was NIS 10; for comparison, the article states that the average monthly salary at the time was NIS 5595, and a babysitter might earn between NIS 15 and 20 an hour.)
You can read the actual article if you have access to JSTOR through your university or something. Otherwise, you can find summaries around the web, but they don't tell you much that I haven't already stated above.
Ok, done being random for today.
12:04PM
Saturday, March 17, 2007 (1 comment)
When I was driving home Wednesday night, I messed up and rear-ended this angry lady driving an SUV. As Murphy dictated, my car got messed up and her SUV had not a single scratch or smudge. Furthermore, the bitch had a terrible attitude. She told me she "wasn't sure if [her] bumper was bent down" so she had to call the police just to make sure. Of course, her SUV is three feet higher off the ground than my car, so my bumper went under hers during the collision. So her bumper would have bent upwards, if anything.
So I got a ticket, my insurance is going to get raped, and my mom cut off three fingers of my left hand. I can't wait until the lady files insurance claims for the severe back problems my 5 mph collision caused.
The next night I parked outside. In the morning, I entered my car and turned it on. I rested my right elbow on the center console and wondered why there was so much condensation on the leather.
Then I looked up and noticed I had left the sunroof open... through a night of rain.
2:20PM
Wednesday, March 14, 2007 (0 comments)
This post intentionally left blank.
9:13PM
Friday, March 2, 2007 (2 comments)
I was doing my routine email check when I found an interesting email from my RA. This is the entire body of the email, emphasis mine:
P.S. Could the girls please remember to not throw away their food in the bathroom trash (it stinks up the place and attracts insects -- I would have thought this was common sense), take their hair out of the shower, not throw up in the shower (this is getting to be a big problem and frankly, it probably will not be long before we will be held accountable), not pee on the toilet seats, remember to FLUSH, and not leave their toothpaste in the sink. This is all COMMON SENSE people and I would like it if we could show some respect for each other.
I had previously thought that every one of these problems can be found exclusively in guys' bathrooms. In fact, before today, I was certain that, at the very least, peeing on toilet seats was a uniquely man-defining characteristic. Guess I was wrong. (Actually, our bathroom on this hall has none of these problems. Stupid girls.)
Here are the replies (sent to everyone on the hall), in order:
Girls pee on the toilet seat?
Yeah...how does that work?
Inquiring minds on this side of the hall would like to know.
Demonstration please?
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which reply was penned by yours truly.
11:06PM
Thursday, March 1, 2007 (0 comments)
So far I've had interviews for three jobs and internships, and they've each involved some sort of technical problem-solving question. I've failed every one of them in some way. On the last one, I basically just said, "I can't solve this."
My lowest grade right now is computer science. I think my brain is slowly decomposing.
Even my macroecon grade is a point higher, and I hate macroecon. It's so boring. I keep missing lecture because it comes right after a 2 hour lunch break, which means I have an hour to eat and an hour to do whatever. The whatever hour is just long enough to nap, but not long enough for the nap to be satisfying. Meaning I can't ever get myself out of bed for class at 1:15 PM. Even worse, whenever I do manage to get up, I just end up falling asleep in lecture because his voice is so monotonous and the subject matter is so dull. Luckily, my macroecon professor happens to be the one who emailed everyone and explicitly stated that it's acceptable to sleep in class.
I'm sorry that you just read the leak from my boring faucet. I really did try to think of what happened over the past week and come up with something at least marginally interesting, but I have failed you.
Oh yeah, I guess there is one thing. One day I was walking to class early in the morning, and I felt a loud fart coming up. I noticed that the closest person was about 15 feet away, so I thought it'd be fun to figure out how loud I could make it. Well, it turned out to be at least 30 decibels more intense than I had expected. The rest of my walk to class was a walk of shame.
8:05PM
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