debitage
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Also, Jesse appears to have a blog.
At band practice, Amanda started singing "Final Countdown." In defense of all that is good in the world, I was obligated to chase her all the way around the hockey rink. But by the time I caught her, I realised that I (1) didn't know what it was I was planning to do to her, and (2) was too tired to do it anyway. I'll get you next time... We just barely made the deadline for getting this week's Maroon-News done. And it still looks pretty crummy. I can blame that on two things: (1) Our sports editors had no clue what they were doing because nobody thought to train them before Jason left last semester, and (2) nobody did a thing Wednesday night.
Most important, though, is the problem of political bias. Last year Len Tkach did his thesis on the World War II monument in Washington, DC. At his defense someone asked him whether, after a year of research, he was for or against the monument. I was impressed that he could say he honestly did not have, and had endeavoured not to take, sides on the issue. It helped him get a balanced view from his interviews with participants in the struggle, and allowed him to look more objectively at the processes of conflict over heritage issues than he could if he had been trying to argue for or against the monument. I'm very strongly opposed to Clinton and Bush's plans for a national missile defense system -- I think it's too high a cost to address too small a threat, while ignoring the underlying reasons for the threat and posing a great risk of antagonising the rest of the world. So I think researching the Russian nuclear arsenal would be too likely to turn into a diatribe against a missile defense system and in favor of retaining the ABM treaty. I have a sort of political bias with regard to the Aral Sea, being a committed environmentalist, but I don't think it has the potential to skew my research in the same way. Of course, if they had let us research South America or Australia, I wouldn't have this problem.
I just discovered that ngaitahu.iwi.nz would have been a real site if I had spelled it correctly.
I feel really useless right now, beause this is my first Maroon-News issue as Managing Editor after two years as Commentary Editor. I came to the office right after class on Wednesday as usual, ready to get to work. Only there's no work to be done. Normally I would be copying articles from e-mail to Word, editing, planning page layouts, maybe putting the finishing touches on my commentary. But that's Sarah Compter's job now, and she isn't here. I have to wait for other people to start working on their sections before I have anything to do. Last night I couldn't get to Blogger because Colgate's internet connection got screwed up. So I didn't get a chance to say that yesterday was a big day for New Zealand. Or at least, for my plans to go to New Zealand. I suddenly got half a dozen e-mails from people I had been trying to get in touch with about my Fulbright/Watson proposal. And they all seemed extremely friendly and helpful. Chris from the National Heritage Trust was very encouraging as far as the possibility of working there. I'm sure I'll have setbacks enough in the coming weeks to feel cynical about, though. I've also decided I'm dropping any plans to apply for the Marshall, Mitchell, or Schupf fellowships. The deadlines are too soon, I've done too little preparation, and there's no conceivable way I would actually get one of them. And it's not that much of a disappointment to decide that. Spending a year in England or Ireland would have been a great experience, and the schools over there are known for having strong Geography programs. But I think the main reason I was considering applying was because people (particularly Judy Fischer, the fellowships advisor) kept telling me I was smart and a campus leader and therefore I was the kind of person these fellowships are looking for. I don't know where they get this idea, because it's certainly not true (but I'm sometimes fooled by being told it so often -- though that was more the case in high school). At least with the Watson and Fulbright I can sell myself on the strength of my research proposal, rather than having to pretend that I'm one of the top students and leaders in the country despite being fairly average by Colgate standards.
Jazz band is going to be a lot more serious this year now that we have a new leader. I should have expected this, because all the candidates for this position led a practice last year as part of their interview. The guy they hired was the guy I liked least. He did a very strict, by-the-book sort of approach -- having us work on the exact crescendoes and articulations marked in the music and such. It felt like high school concert band. The other guys were looser, more like what jazz should be like. One guy taught us a song by ear. The other one had us play II BS/Haitian Fight Song, which is an inherently unstructured song -- you just cue various lines to come in and out. Both of them had us do a lot of improvising. It's certainly possible to be too loose, as I learned freshman year. Daryl (our leader) didn't even come to our performances, and we played some songs without drums because we didn't have a drummer. A lot of times on stage we just made stuff up. We had a few weird arrangements that we created, like the funk version of "Mr. PC." We've had attendance problems all along, which hopefully the stricter approach will clear up. But now I'm concerned that things will be too restrictive; that we'll lose some of the casual creativity that made jazz band fun. We also need to recruit some trombone players. 2) New Zealand has a .iwi extension (as in, ngatitahu.iwi.nz, which is in some email addresses but apparently doesn't have a website). I found that to be really cool. Iwi is the Maori word that means (roughly) tribe. Ngati Tahu, for example, is a Maori Iwi. But they insist on using the British-style .ac for universities, instead of .edu like the US and Australia do.
I keep discovering that computers in the Maroon-News office that we thought were broken are actually workable. It's a nice improvement over the time last year when we did an issue with two computers after the scanner computer completely fried (not even Matt Hotham could resurrect that one). One of the computers I found was giving me some problems, because the control panel was grayed out, so I couldn't change the settings to get it on the network. I tried everything I could think of, but it didn't help. This was especially frustrating because this computer was a layout computer (which we need), and had a version of Netscape new enough to be able to handle Webmail, but old enough that it would run on the other M-N computers. This meant that if I could get this computer on the network, I could pass the Netscape files over the server to the other computers, and all of a sudden we'd have 7 computers that could access the internet instead of just 2. Today Daisie offered to help me fix the problems via IM, so I rushed over to the office. She didn't repsond for a while (she probably had to actually do work or something. Sheesh.), so I started fiddling again. I discovered that by holding down the space bar while starting up the computer, I could get it to show the control panels again. It was all downhill from there. The only remaining problem was that the port next to the computer was dead, so I now have an ethernet cable stretched across the door to the editors' room. I ran up the hill to buy a longer one, along the way failing to effectively sneak up on Amanda. When I reached the bookstore, I saw the helpful sign "we are sold out of ethernet cords." Bah. But I needed to buy a reading packet while I was there, so it wasn't a total waste.
Estimated temperature of Hell, according to two Spanish physicists' interpretation of the Bible: 832 degrees F. Estimated number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, according to the American Institute of Physics: 1064.
it's strange to think that I now hold a leadership position in the church. I suppose part of it is that I just can't see myself as the pillar of Christian faith that people like Dea DeWitt and Matt Laubenstein were (granted, they were Stewards and I'm just editor of the UC newsletter, but still). It's even less true now than last year when I signed on to be a leader, since my beliefs took a definite Unitarian turn this summer (though I still insist on thinking of myself as a Lutheran, just like I consider myself a Pennsylvanian despite having spent the last three years in New York). I suppose it will work out fine since I'll be dealing with PageMaker more than God. And it's not a bad trade off -- I mean, God's got that whole saving you from eternal damnation thing, but can he adjust line spacing in .1 point increments? The new people in UC seem pretty cool. There were two girls who, upon learning that I lived in Cushman, expressed a great deal of sadness that they didn't come to our party last night, chosing instead to wander around downtown and then watch the Matrix. They were cheerleaders, though, so maybe I should have warned them that the party consisted almost entirely of band people. And there was another girl who was amazed that you could get AOL IM without having AOL.
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If you ever buy cups that come in a big stack, watch out. That's how the reproduce. Orgy in Aisle 7!