A word about basketball

First of all, a threefold correction to what I posted yesterday. First of all, the Red Sox redeemed themselves by crushing Tampa Bay today, and in a most entertaining way, might I add. I can't believe Arroyo kept throwing at people even after the benches cleared the first time. For the Pats, redemption came by getting a corner in the third round and a safety in the fourth... hopefully either Ellis Hobbs or James Sanders can fill Ty Law's shoes someday.

And as for the Celtics... what an idiot I am! I complained about their pathetic playoff performance while they were still in the first quarter of Game 1, and it was 12-4 Pacers. Apparently they pulled it out in the end... I was worried at one point in the third quarter though... they were only up by 37... scary. In all seriousness, I'm really happy with what I saw last night... especially from Payton, he just went nuts.

But that's not really the basketball I'm here to talk about. Because tomorrow, at lunch, in the gym, for just one dollar, for an incredibly good cause... you can see the most memorable basketball game of all time. Because tomorrow is the annual Student-Faculty Basketball Game.

My plan is to stare down the mighty Mr. Carey until he's trembling with fear, and then throw down the dunk of the century, right in his face. Or if that fails, just outrun him. Or if that fails, just rely on Joel's mad skills to carry us to victory.

And if all three of those fail, then I'll just need to have five sandwiches on hand, so I can bribe the ref not to notice while I'm fouling the bajesus out of every teacher in sight.

Not that I'm saying that anything will fail. Because of course it will not. Because of course the students are prepared to run away with a blowout win, humiliating the good men and women who have worked so hard to educate us for four years. Wow... I am such a bad human being.

Oh well.

One week gone by, twelve lessons learned

Time for another post where I ramble about a bunch of unrelated, uninteresting things going on in my life. Behold the power of boredom... it inspires masterpieces like this.

Anyway, here are twelve random things I learned this week.

-Auto mechanics are scumbags. I'd always heard about this one before, but today was the first time I learned firsthand. Apparently a headlight with water in it requires $68 worth of labor to dry it out and seal it off. I'm still scratching my head trying to figure that one out.

-Finding Neverland is an awesome movie... and on a related note, I also learned that I'm a sucker for cute little kids with acting ability. With all due respect to Morgan Freeman, Freddie Highmore should have won an Oscar.

-Never mention your lunch plans around juniors. Six of them will ask you to pick food up for them, and three of the six won't pay you back. One of those three will be someone who already owed you like $25 from a year ago, and obviously isn't good for it.

-Listening to Weezer is incredibly addictive. I had a couple of their albums gathering dust on a shelf until just recently, and then decided to rediscover them. Within hours, I had "Say It Ain't So," "Photograph," "My Name Is Jonas," and "Love Explosion" all stuck in my head. Now I'm hooked.

-EasyCheese sprayed onto sour cream and onion chips... not so addictive. Kinda disgusting, actually.

-All of Boston's pro sports teams both rule and suck. The Red Sox shot to first place in the AL East with an awesome start to their week, but for some reason they can't handle the Devil Rays. The Celtics won their division, but are in the process of being obliterated by the Pacers as of this writing. As for the Patriots... Tom Brady was an awesome SNL host last weekend, but... Logan Mankins? We kinda had some defensive backfield issues to work out, which makes our first pick a bit disappointing.

-Science bowl practices are much more fun when you eat a pound of pistachios in a half hour.

-"Pistachioes" is not an accepted spelling of "pistachios."

-Going to court to plead guilty to speeding is a dumb idea. Rather than just pay my ticket, I chose to sit in a courtroom for an hour waiting for my case, then pay $56 in court fees for a fifteen-second trial. Does that courtroom make $13,440 an hour? Or am I missing something here? Or do I just suck at math? Probably all three.

-Certain people have trouble controlling their elation upon hearing of news items such as school superintendents being fired.

-Certain other people should go to Emerson and not UT-Austin. Moreover, there are still others who should choose Harvard over MIT. Something tells me that my bugging these people isn't really helping anything, so I should just give up.

-Lastly but not leastly (no, it isn't a word... sue me), I need a job. Finding someone dumb enough to hire me is not as easy as I thought. Hmmmmph.

That's kinda annoying... I just talked about everything my brain could find, and I'm done, and I'm still bored. Should I do the crossword? Or start writing the script for Taylor and Evans Go To Sheetz (Or Someplace Else)? Or... god forbid... do my homework? Only time will tell.

Ten great Jumbos

I was bored and curious this morning, so I started reading up on Tufts history. I was interested in seeing what kinds of cool stuff people accomplish after leaving, so I read a bunch of things on a bunch of websites, and I ended up being quite impressed. So, without further ado, for anyone who cares, here goes. The ten coolest Tufts students of all time.

10. Jessica Biel. Awesome actress, appeared on 7th Heaven and in Texas Chainsaw Massacre... oh, who am I kidding? I'll just admit it, there are only nine cool Tufts students.

9. Pierre Omidyar. One of the founders of eBay. Not only is he richer than God, but he created a way for people to blow their money on all kinds of stuff with the click of a mouse. Gotta love that.

8. Roderick MacKinnon. He won the 2003 Nobel Prize in chemistry. I'd explain what he did, but I don't understand it. Let's just move on, shall we?

7. Bill Richardson. Governor of New Mexico. John Kerry was considering him as a possible running mate... that didn't work out though.

6. Rob Burnett. Emmy-winning TV producer. Produces the Late Show on CBS... that's Letterman's show, which means automatic coolness points for Burnett.

5. Norbert Wiener. Second-smartest person of all time (for more information on the smartest person of all time, please refer to item #1, further down this list). Did lots of work with robots, and is known as the founder of cybernetics.

4. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Served a whopping four terms in the Senate. Was one of the leading thinkers behind Social Security reform before he died... I'm sure he's rolling in his grave now.

3. Ryan Miller. Lead singer of Guster. "Amsterdam" and "Careful" are both stuck in my head right now, so I felt compelled to put him this high on my list.

2. Hank Azaria. You may have seen him in The Birdcage, Dodgeball, Along Came Polly, or Godzilla... or on the Simpsons, where he does the voices for Moe, Apu, Chief Wiggum, Cletus, Frink, and the Comic Book Guy, among many others. How cool is THAT?

1. Me. Probably the least famous person on this list, but definitely the smartest, best looking, most creative, most talented, and of course, coolest.

So, yeah, I visited on Thursday. I sat in on a class and the professor was awesome. I visited a dining hall and the food was amazing. I took a tour and the campus was beautiful. So as soon as I send in my deposit, it'll be official. Then again, if you judge these things by when the t-shirt gets bought and when the sticker goes up on the car window, then perhaps it's already official. Whatever.

I need to go do some chemistry that should have been done a month ago. I'm done for now.

Bostonian observations

BU, I must admit, was surprisingly interesting. The campus is really nice, and it blends into the rest of the city well, so it really feels urban (which I happen to like). But they also have a lot of space along the Charles River that they call the BU Beach, where you can hang out in the shade and study/picnic/play frisbee, and kinda get away from the whole inner-city Boston environment. That's pretty cool.

The College of Communications has a radio station where students can sign up to have their own shows. I had to bite my lip hard to keep from cracking up when the tour guide mentioned that two of her friends did a two-hour radio show devoted to Bon Jovi. (That was not only hilarious, but also inspiring... if I do end up here, a certain COM classmate of mine will definitely have to do a radio show with me. Wink wink, nudge nudge.)

On the minus side, their classes are huge. There was mention of three or four hundred-student classes for freshmen, and not only that but classes of twenty or twenty-five seemed to be what they considered minuscule. Yuck. They also wouldn't let me go to their dining hall for lunch, citing some nonsense about it being just for students, so I can only assume that their food is gross and they're hiding it from me. Tufts' food is supposed to be awesome, too.

Seeing as how I just walked around a college campus two blocks from Fenway Park, swarmed with hundreds (literally, hundreds, I'm not kidding) of people in Red Sox hats and/or shirts, I think this is a good place to mention four random Red Sox-related thoughts floating around in my head.

1) Being 0-2 sucks. I don't know how many more losses I can take before I have a nervous breakdown.

2) Johnny "The Messiah" Damon is now a published author, apparently. I visited the BU bookstore and there was a huge display of Idiot, his book about playing for the Red Sox. How cool is that?

3) Rumor floating around Boston is that Terry Francona had a heart attack today. All the papers are saying is he's having some tests because of some minor chest tightness. I hope he's okay... he's had heart issues for a while now, this is a bit worrisome.

4) Is it just me, or is this absolutely hilarious? Oh? It is just me? Okay, whatever.

My brain's empty, so that's all for now. Tufts is tomorrow, stay tuned.

Spring break

Well... it's just about official... I'm Boston-bound. Columbia opted against giving my life an interesting plot twist, instead going with the obvious rejection. How boring. I guess NYU still has a slight glimmer of a possibility, but I'm about 99% sure that I'll reject their offer of a waitlist spot.

So the question becomes: Tufts or BU? I’m fairly sure about choosing the former, but a little visiting never hurt anyone. Hopefully I’ll have a decision made at the end of the week.

My spring break is goin’ down a little somethin’ like this:

Saturday: Woke up at five AM, did five debates, went 2-2 with one tie. Came home and slept a lot.

Yesterday: Read some Conrad, watched lots of ESPN Classic (it was Red Sox day… it was awesome), played four hours of poker. Was down about $6 after the first 3:50, but the last ten minutes were insane.

Got all my money in with the best hand, only to watch Ben catch a miracle five, followed by the river making one my redraws, a heart. $38 pot goes my way. Ben moves all-in on the next hand about ten seconds later, I look down and see an ace and a queen, and call before bothering to see my next two cards. The flop comes AQ4 with two spades, Zach pushes for $14 more, I call with my two pair, and the money in both pots, the main pot and Zach’s side pot, totals about sixty bucks. I’m probably scarred for life with the memory of Zach’s voice screaming “SPADE!” but whatever. Even if I lost a ton of money on one river card, it was still a hell of a lot of fun watching… $61 I think? … all won in one pot.

Today: Sleeping, reading, writing this, downloading some music, packing, and when I get around to it, doing some job hunting.

Tomorrow: Flying to Beantown!

Wednesday: BU Day.

Thursday: Tufts Day.

Friday: Flying home, and getting to visit the historic Philadelphia International Airport for the first time. Exciting!

Saturday, Sunday, probably Monday morning knowing me: Homework, and lots of it.

I really should focus on school for the next month. Throwing away my college chances by getting admissions rescinded over terrible chem or English semesters would suck. Doing a bit of work would be wise.

The good news on that front is that Tufts’ final report only asks for a transcript. So they won’t see my third-nine-weeks grades… only the final ones for this year. Time to go do some chem problems and read some more Heart of Darkness!