No place to study (except in the study area and everywhere else)

It's student election time again. In the spring, we vote for Student Body President, Vice President, and Treasurer, along with representatives for freshmen, sophomores, colleges, and grad students. Sound exciting? Oh, it is.

At UF, one political party controls most of Student Government. It's the party that all of the fraternities and sororities happen to support, and these days it's known as the Unite Party. They always win.

There's also one or several opposition parties. The past few semesters, there have been the Orange & Blue Party and the Progress Party, but after cannibalizing each other's votes last semester, they've decided to (ahem) unite as the Student Alliance. Their presidential candidate is Ben Cavataro, whom I mentioned around this time last year. He used to represent my dorm in Student Government, and I have a high opinion of him.

One of the big issues this semester is the student union. The university wants to increase tuition so it can raise funds to expand the building. The majority party, which basically always does whatever the university administration wants, supports the plan. The issue is now on the ballot for students to vote on (albeit in a non-binding manner).

This week, I've seen official-looking signs posted in the student union that list so-called problems with the current building and the benefits of jacking up our tuition to fix them. One of the "problems" is that the building has "no place to study," even though a large study area was just built about a year ago. Today (well, yesterday, since I'm writing this after midnight), I wrote a letter to a student newspaper expressing my outrage at the university for creating these signs with false statements.

Then I read today's issue of the paper and found out that the signs had been created by a student-run campaign, not the university. Oops. By the time I was able to send a correction to the newspaper, they told me that my letter had already gone to press. Tomorrow, a lot of people might realize that I'm not technically right. Boo.

In my defense, the signs were misleading and were placed very prominently, as if the university had endorsed their message. In fact, that's actually likely because I've never seen any other student group's signs placed at the entrances of the building for all to see. As if that weren't enough, some university departments actually have officially endorsed the campaign.

Also, my letter can pretty much be read as though I'm criticizing the university for allowing the signs to be put up, so all in all, I guess I'm still right. I just hope no one nitpicks.

Here's an old video about how they make food look good for TV commercials. (Via The Presurfer)

This compact calendar is pretty clever. (Via Lifehacker)

I knew I'd seen this cliché in about a million TV shows and movies: Let's Enhance. (Via waxy.org)

Brain damage

My right brain and left brain need to sit down and have a chat sometime.

Sometimes I'm caught having to choose between what's logically sound and what feels good. It doesn't have to be anything big; even little things can tear me to pieces.

For a while now, my parents have been giving me scratch-off lottery tickets as small gifts. Playing the lottery is a bad idea if you want to win. It is a system designed to make money; otherwise, it wouldn't exist. As I've been more and more concerned about saving money, I asked my parents to stop buying me lottery tickets and to maybe give me the money they would have otherwise spent on the tickets instead. Of course, I regretted it as soon as the words came out of my mouth.

But scratch-offs were fun, they said. They didn't sound too happy, so I backpedaled. I had wanted to categorically reject all gambling because it's a bad idea that makes people lose money, but I compromised myself because my emotions got the better of me. I feel like I should be able to say, "Please don't buy me lottery tickets, do something useful with your money instead," but on the other hand, I want my parents to be happy. Also, seeing if you've won can be entertaining, and the proceeds of the Florida Lottery fund education.

There are always two sides to every issue. Why do they both have to have merit? It only makes life more difficult for those of us who want to make principled decisions.

And then there are the Hare Krishna types who serve lunch at my university. Krishna Lunch is considered an institution because they've been doing it for many years. People like the food, and it comes at a competitive price. Every day around lunchtime, students line up on the plaza to be served while Hare Krishnas play their Hare Krishna music and chant Hare Krishna.

I've had Krishna Lunch once or twice. It was pretty tasty. I might like to take advantage of their cheap lunch offers more often, but I'm concerned about who I give my money to and what it says about me. I'm obviously not too keen on giving my money to a religious organization because then they have that much more of an ability to spread their religious nonsense.

In my research, I've found that Krishna Lunch is a nonprofit, which puts me at ease somewhat. But there's still another issue that I think is important. I feel that if I'm caught with one of their paper plates full of unidentifiable food, there should be some kind of disclaimer above my head stating that I don't necessarily endorse the beliefs or practices of the organization.

I guess I might as well go through with it; I don't think anyone would judge me. I should be more concerned about whether I would judge myself. And I did eat at a Chick-fil-A recently, which is like giving money to a church (and getting a crappy sandwich and delicious fries in return). But what would you do if you were me?

Less money, mo' problems.

Slate asks: Why Do We Call Galileo Galilei by His First Name? (Via J-Walk Blog)

This chart could be handy for me now that I'm dabbling in buying perishable food: The Table of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad. (Via All About Me - And Then Some)

Blue tape

During my freshman year, I was hanging out with some members of Gator Freethought after a meeting, and I mentioned my plan to start an Esperanto club. The president of Gator Freethought offered me a word of caution.

It's a lot of work to start a club, he said. "There's a lot of red tape."

One thing that student organization presidents have to do is attend a training session at the beginning of each year. They mostly just go over the rules that you had to go over yourself to renew your club's registration a week or two ago. But, in any case, there are a few morsels of new information.

As I found out at a training session on Wednesday, one of the new rules for this year is that organizations can bring "outside" food into meetings as long as it doesn't have to be temperature controlled. Previously, clubs had to rely on the student union's catering service for all their food needs. (Their pizza is the worst I've ever had, so that's a welcome change.)

The woman explaining the new rules mentioned as an afterthought that we couldn't bring non-Pepsi products to meetings.

Wait, what? Yeah. You should have heard the uproar in the room.

Apparently, since UF has a deal to sell Pepsi everywhere on campus and tout it as the official soft drink of the Gator Nation or whatever, student organizations—which, as the presenter stressed in another part of the program, are not part of the university—are bound by that sponsorship deal as well. Capitalism rears its ugly head, stifling consumer choice and common sense.

Where does it end? Are Coca-Cola's Hi-C juice boxes out of the question? If I want to bring oatmeal to a meeting, does it have to be made by PepsiCo's Quaker Oats? How much money is the university getting from this stupid deal, and could it be had without making personae non gratae out of those who have the good sense to spit in the face of its stifling provisions?

Since then, I've noticed that the ubiquitous Pepsi machines around campus say "Thanks for Choosing Pepsi." Some choice we have, all right.

So, the university gives everybody some free web space. Not many people know about or take advantage of the offer because it's not 1996 anymore, but I thought I'd put my own space to good use.

As viewed from a campus IP address (and forwarded to my screen by SSH tunneling):

And from off-campus:

A real '50s instructional film: Dating: Do's and Don'ts. It's in color, too! (Part of the film is missing, hence the lack of an introduction.)

Famous films edited down to (about) five seconds: 5 Second Movies.

And finally, I know this site isn't new, but I've never linked to it here before: Will It Blend?

A grammatical interlude

Today in one of my classes, we did something I haven't done since high school: we peer-reviewed each other's research papers. And no, I'm not talking about fact checking; I mean basic stuff like proofreading. We split into groups of three, and each person proofread the others' essays and offered comments. I bet I was the only one in the class to use proofreader's marks, which I'd been taught in sixth or seventh or eighth grade.

But anyway, I'm not a big fan of peer review in classrooms. The process is fundamentally broken; it assumes that each person knows more about writing than someone else, which is just not true. For example: a classmate marked my use of the Latin phrases per se and status quo as clichés and said not to use them because they weakened my argument. De facto just seemed to confuse the hell out of her. Maybe I won't italicize my Latin phrases in the final draft.

But the biggie came when I saw her scrawling a note in the margin saying not to start a sentence with "because." What the heck, guys.

Schoolteachers tell schoolchildren not to start a sentence with "because" to prevent them from writing incomplete sentences:

Because I like cookies.

This sentence has no main idea; "Because I like cookies" is a subordinate clause and must have a main clause or whatever it's called to go with it. (Excuse me; it's been a while. I hope this doesn't, ahem, weaken my argument.) Now let's consider another sentence with the word "because":

I bought extra milk because I like cookies.

No one can deny that that is a grammatically correct sentence. But if all our sentences looked like that, the world would be a boring place to read stuff, and we'd probably just watch more TV. So what do good writers do? They shake up their sentence structure by reversing clauses!

Because I like cookies, I bought extra milk.

"Oh noes! It starts with 'because'!" Chill. It's okay. There's a whole idea in there, see? There is absolutely nothing wrong with this sentence (except that liking cookies too much might make you fat). It's just like the last sentence. There's a main idea ("I bought extra milk") with a supporting idea ("because I like cookies") backing it up.

To be fair, my classmate made valid criticisms of my 3 A.M. writing. I can't really blame her for not realizing her mistake. Not everyone is a grammar whiz, after all.

No, I think the problem ultimately comes down to English teachers. They tell kids not to start sentences with "because," a sweeping and inappropriate generalization. To make matters worse, they hardly ever seem to "unteach" it later on by saying that starting a sentence with "because" is okay if you do it right. So this "rule" remains in students' heads, standing as an artificial impediment to their self-expression.

So, English teachers, can you please stop saying that a sentence can never begin with "because"? You'd be doing your students a favor, and the rest of us would really appreciate it too.

(And yes, I realize that I've started a sentence with a coordinating conjunction seven times. Oops. Make that eight.)

I thought it was obvious, but there's a long Wikipedia article about it: the evenness of zero.

The Pac-Man Dossier consists of everything you ever wanted to know about Pac-Man, all on one page. (Via The Presurfer)

The price of a first-class stamp is going up so often that by the time I remember what it is, it's changed again. So I guess I'm not the only person who had this idea for a simple web site: priceofastamp.com. (Via The Presurfer)

Play nice, kids

[Edit Tue, Feb 10, 2009 22:27 EST: Wow. Um, this post is about me getting my Internet access cut off because I was using BitTorrent. After I wrote it, I got a message saying that my access was blocked because of bad authentication - I had just changed my password, and it hadn't propagated through the system yet. So, um, let's just pretend I didn't accidentally incriminate myself.]

Brian Malow is a comedian... who jokes about science! Don't worry, his jokes are very accessible and still pretty funny.

Last year, there were several Internet outages due to cable breaks in the Mediterranean. New Scientist reports on why the sea is the Achilles' heel of the web.

It's the same everywhere

This morning, someone with glossy flyers came out of nowhere and started talking at me about all manner of topics. It's that time of year again!

A university is a microcosm of society. And just like in the actual cosm, school politics have been flaring up over the past few weeks. Student Government elections are next week, and it's once again down to the classic battle of the Greek party vs. the non-Greek party. The former is the Gator Party, while the latter is the Orange and Blue Party. Here at UF, it's the same as it is with many universities: the Greeks dominate student politics.

Earlier this year, a UF sorority member (who wished to be anonymous for her safety) had this to say:

Apparently, in recent years, stickers that say "I Voted" have been banned, but now they just give out "SG" stickers instead. Can you see why the Gator Party might oppose online voting? In fact, they oppose it vehemently. They know what will happen if it becomes easier for students to vote. Turnout increases dramatically. If Greeks are a minority of students, and they're all already voting, they won't be the majority of voters for very long.

Last year, I voted against the Gator Party, and I plan to do the same this time. While the Gator Party's platform includes wastes of money like putting crossing guards at crosswalks that I've crossed safely for a year and putting a video rental store in the student union, Orange and Blue's platform is shorter and actually has details of their plans. And I like what I see: online voting, eliminating wastes of money, socially responsible investing, getting student pep rally acts that people have heard of (unlike last year's Frank Caliendo and Lynyrd Skynyrd or this year's Jon Reep and Steve Miller Band). Already this fall, as the minority party, they've blocked a regulation that would have limited the legal consumption of alcohol by students anywhere and pushed to make the day before Thanksgiving a holiday. Not bad.

More importantly, we need to shake things up in Student Government. If the people in charge are working harder to stay in charge than to respond to students' needs and wants, they need to be kicked out. Fortunately, my dorm went for the non-Greek party last year, and our representative is now trying to hang on to his seat, one of the few that Orange and Blue has. Incidentally, I'm acquaintances with his Gator Party opponent, so it would be weird if I saw Mr. Gator Party and was like, "Hey, I'm not voting for you." But if he tries to convince me to vote for him, I'll have to tell him how I feel.

Oh yes, even the links are getting political. From Chicken Girl: Sarah Palin's Greatest Hits.

Another one: Celebrities tell you to vote.

Okay, this isn't political, but it's cool. Have you ever wondered what a search query would have been like in the past? Like, what if you could search for "osama bin laden terrorist threat" before 9/11? For Google's 10th birthday, they've brought back their oldest surviving search index, from January 2001, for a limited time only. You can search the web as it was in 2001. Each search result includes a link to the Internet Archive's earliest archived version of that page for 2001, in the likely event that the page has been moved, deleted, or changed.

Darts and laurels

A few months back, I discovered Brad Sucks, a "one-man band with no fans" who had a lot of fans. His only album at the time, 2003's I Don't Know What I'm Doing, was very good, and I think he owes his fan base to the fact that he distributed the album for free under a Creative Commons license that allowed for noncommercial use and remixing.

This week, he released his second album, Out of It. It was the first time I was excited about the release of a new album, maybe... ever? Anyway, it's a short record, but if you liked the first one, you'll enjoy it. You can download it in MP3 format for whatever price you want, including for free. (For the Ogg Vorbis q7 version, Jamendo has a torrent and a direct download link.)

Interestingly, the new album is released under a Creative Commons license that allows commercial and noncommercial use of all kinds, provided that the artist is credited and that derivative works are released under the same license. Incidentally, this license is incompatible with the license Brad used for his first album, which means you can't mash up tracks from the two without permission. Still, it's good that he chose a more generous license for Out of It. He can get away with it since he has so many fans.

I've also heard of this fellow called Girl Talk and how everyone loves him. Unauthorized mashups are his thing. Yesterday, when Waxy.org analyzed the hundreds of samples he used on his latest album, I decided to download it. It's called Feed the Animals, and it's a 53-minute orgy of popular music. There's something for everyone. Recommended.

You know what's annoying? Selling out. I have stopped visiting a number of sites because they were jumping on the money bandwagon and/or acting all high and mighty. At The Sneeze, Steve's running jokes got old fast, and he pretends that his blog is a magazine. I am mad at PostSecret because Frank Warren passes over normal people's secrets in favor of the most scandalous ones, which he then makes money from by putting them in expensive books and music videos. Jessica Hagy of Indexed accepted a book deal. Damn Interesting reposts the same damn articles over and over again... because they're busy writing a book (and sometimes for no apparent reason at all).

Remember a few months ago when I said this?

Jim Davis, the mastermind behind the Garfield empire, has now realized that if you can't beat 'em, you should join 'em. His company is going to publish a book of old Garfield strips with Garfield removed, and the Garfield Minus Garfield guy is going to write the foreword. This is just absolutely nuts... and I count it as a sell-out.

I was going to say that I Can Has Cheezburger was getting very close to the point of selling out. It's run by an actual company now. They've had sweepstakes and have launched sister sites in case this lolcat thing doesn't work out. Yes, I was going to say that ICHC is close... but I just went to the site and saw that I Can Has Cheezburger is now a registered trademark of Pet Holdings, Inc. Whaaa?

To you alleged sellouts: Don't be mad. I used to love you all. You had, and still have, some great ideas. I still have a place in my heart for each of you (except maybe The Sneeze). And hey, there's no such thing as bad publicity, right?

As we all know, good-looking people face so many problems in our society. Fortunately, there's now a social network just for them: BeautifulPeople. To get in, you have to be voted attractive by members who are of the opposite sex. Then you have to pay pretty dang much money if you want full membership. (£69.95 a year? What the heck?)

One of those university projects: Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene.

How much of the things you remember actually happened? A recent (or not recent, I can't tell how old the article is) study suggests that creating false memories is pretty easy.

E-mail frustration

This is a tale of two e-mail accounts. I have one for personal use and one (from my university) for academic use. I use their corresponding POP accounts with Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 on Ubuntu. The server settings are identical. Thunderbird is set to download new messages whenever there are any new ones. But starting a few days ago, Thunderbird started telling me I had no new messages in my personal account even though I could log in to the web interface and see that I did. Thunderbird still connects to the server quickly and successfully, but it has been saying "There are no new messages on the server" when there are.

Since Thunderbird is getting mail from my school account just fine, I have to assume that it's a server problem. But I've exhausted just about every option that I can think of. Well, I've run Thunderbird in safe mode, compacted my folders (hey, you never know), and deleted all the mail from the server, but Thunderbird still doesn't acknowledge any new mail. The only thing I can really think of, except for some esoteric e-mail server bug that I'd never understand, is that the port might have changed. But port 110 (the default for POP) has worked fine for me for years, and I don't feel like making thousands of guesses in the unlikely event that they suddenly switched ports.

Possibly useful note: I have Thunderbird set to leave old messages on the server for 90 days. The ones it has downloaded are marked as read on the web interface, while the ones it hasn't are marked as unread (unless I read them online, in which case Thunderbird will still download them at the next opportunity). When I checked my inbox on the web yesterday, the first three or so e-mails that Thunderbird hadn't downloaded were marked as read. The subsequent messages were all marked as unread, as they should have been. I think Thunderbird might have choked on them, but shouldn't it be unchoked now? Is there some file in the profile that I could delete that would regenerate itself and fix everything?

I sent a support request to my e-mail provider last night, but they haven't replied yet. They'd better soon, since I pay for their service. Maybe I should point out how much money I've given them for their quality service over the years.

And yes, I still put the hyphen in "e-mail." Always.

[Edit Tue Aug 5, 2008 7:52 UTC -5: This problem has fixed itself, lending further evidence that it was an issue with the server. I haven't received a reply from my mail provider.]

Speaking of problems, I tried the pidgin-facebookchat plugin for the Pidgin IM client. It allows you to use the Facebook chat feature from within Pidgin. It was pretty cool except that you couldn't get your whole buddy list (friends list) at once; they would simply appear as they signed on. And if you deleted someone from your buddy list, it would defriend that person on Facebook. I found that one out the hard way. Imagine my surprise when I eventually discovered that I had 90 friends missing. Luckily, I was able to add them back quickly, and I think some of them didn't even know what happened.

The price of first-class postage in the US is going up more and more often these days, and the USPS claims that they're just following inflation. It turns out that they're right. Here's a chart of the US first-class postage rate from 1885 to 2008, adjusted for inflation. Although the nominal cost of a stamp has more than doubled since 1981, the actual cost in 2008 dollars has remained between $0.40 and $0.45. By comparison, it has varied between $0.20 and over $0.50 in the past.

Typographers are responsible for making the fonts that we see all around us in our daily lives. Some guy wondered: what does a typographers' handwriting look like? Of the typographers he asked, all have pretty cool handwriting. One guy's handwriting looks like a familiar font because he made a font out of his handwriting.

Summertime blues

It's summertime in The World of Colleges. All of my friends are either taking summer classes, traveling Europe, pursuing research opportunities at national laboratories, getting married, or working. Yes, working. I'm home for three months, so I figure I'd try to get a job that's close enough to walk to and that I could work at, say, most days of the week. I could always use the money.

I searched the Internet for extremely local job listings and found a place close by that was looking for someone to do easy but tedious work on their web site. As it happens, I love doing easy but tedious things, and I have experience with web sites. I got the resume ready (thanks Kirsten), wrote a cover letter, and shot them an e-mail. Response: "I have found someone for that position. Thank you." I told her to take the ad off the freaking web site so other people wouldn't make my unfortunate mistake of wasting time trying to apply. I did not use the words "freaking" or "wasting," but that's how I felt.

So I went around to some local businesses to see which were hiring. Then I went home and called them to see what positions were available. The pizza place wanted a chef, and the Thai restaurant wanted a delivery boy. Nope and nope. I haven't tried calling the others because I can't decide which one I would want to work at the least.

Ah, getting a job. It's totally worthwhile, even necessary. It can bring you security and happiness. But finding one is tough. You will get burned a lot, especially if you have little to no experience. And the longer you wait, the harder it gets. Good thing nothing else in life is just like that.

I need to come up with a clever idea to make money. One that doesn't involve writing a cover letter. Something really stupid yet clever that no one has thought of yet. Maybe I could just play the guitar on a street corner. Maybe I can start a business and Be My Own Boss™. I also need an outlet for my near-constant frustration. I mean, besides this blog. Something that doesn't involve complaining. I wish I could make art. Angry art. Sad art. Luckily, anything can pass for art these days, so I guess I could throw paint on a wall and call it art. But art isn't really my thing. I want to smash things or blow stuff up in a field. And I want to not clean up after it.

Maybe I can make a business out of smashing things. Send me $50 or the iPhone gets it.

On a completely random note, no one has ever bought anything from the World of Stuff Store.

By the way: Justin is in Rome for one of his classes, Adam is going to pursue a research opportunity at a national laboratory, and Jennipher is apparently engaged. I don't know her that well, but we're friends on Facebook.

This is cool if you're an independent artist: TuneCore distributes your music and videos to Internet music stores. You keep the rights to your songs and and all the money they make.

Big-time Jeopardy! winner Ken Jennings has interviewed a former Jeopardy! writer. Carlo Panno reveals all the secrets about how the show was made, as well as some amusing anecdotes. Here's the interview: parts 1, 2, and 3.

Because you've always wondered: The Stories Behind 10 Famous Product Placements.

Where was I?

A lot has happened in the past week.

I had a physics test on Tuesday. I needed to study a lot for it, because I got only 12 out of 20 right on the first test. Luckily, my physics professors know how hard their class is, so a 60% is only a C+ (at my junior high it would have been a solid F). Still, I don't like C's or even B's. (Maybe I should mention here that you're allowed to have a handwritten cheat sheet for each test. I got a 60 with a cheat sheet.) So all the time I spent copying formulas and the answers to common problems paid off, because I got a 15 out of 20 - a B. I now have a B in the class. Yay.

I had a date planned for two Fridays ago, but it got postponed. A few minutes after sending off my last post, I rescheduled. We agreed Friday night.

On Wednesday, I did the whole "Are we still on for Friday?" thing. You know, where you... ask if you're still on for Friday. She said yeah, and that she'd like to bring a friend along. Oh crap. I try so hard to make my intentions made clear without looking like a jerk or a fool, but apparently I don't try hard enough. So I'm like, well, I think it should be just you and me... And she's all, oh, so it's like a date? And I'm, well, yeah... And she goes, oh, sorry, I'm not... whatever whatever. So I'm like, that's cool, you can bring your friend. And she's all, okay.

I was very disappointed about that. I've been trying all year, and I've still never been on a date. I talked about it to my friend Daniel, and he sent me some e-books on how to pick up girls and communicate with people and things like that. The one about girls caught my interest. It was from a guy in the seduction community, which I had only ever heard of on Wikipedia. Basically, it's a loosely-knit group of people who practice the art of picking up women. This one guy's recommendation was that you stand out and play hard to get. Well, everybody tells you to do that, but he explained it in detail. According to him, you have to say something crazy to get her attention, tell lots of interesting stories, and then act like you don't give a care about her. I mean, there's more to it than that, but that's basically it. If you do it like he says, then she's supposed to be begging for your phone number as you come up with excuse after excuse not to give it to her, only to divulge it finally after she's practically grabbing your arm. Or whatever.

Besides being awfully manipulative, it requires you to act like someone you're not, which is not only dishonest but also a lot of work. Although, I have to say, acting like myself isn't working well at all. There's got to be some sort of middle way where I can still be myself, but in a better way. I hope I can gleam some valuable information from the other e-books, which I haven't read too much of yet. The other one I've read most of is about body language. I find it interesting because I can't read body language at all. I'm hardly ever aware that someone may be using body language to convey feelings other than what they're expressing verbally.

There's just so much I have to think about. I could probably follow that one book to the letter and take a girl home every night, but I wouldn't like it. I probably should make a habit of approaching random girls -- I'm sure not meeting many as it is -- but how do I go about it? Should I continue to act the way I am even though it frustrates me in ways you can't possibly imagine? Should I pretend to be something I'm not? Should I actually change? Why should I even have to read these books anyway? It makes me feel like less of a man that I can't do these things myself. It's like I was born not knowing how to engage in social interaction.

Once I read an article or something that said how smart children are treated differently by adults. They don't spend as much time fostering the children's emotional and social development as much as they do with other kids because they think that the smart kids are just so precocious that they don't need their help. But it's not true. The result is that you have smart, neglected kids who can't do anything. So the article went. I wonder if I can find it.

So, maybe I need to practice reading body language and doing things like that. Actually, while I'm at it, why don't I go off on this tangent: Kissing sucks. Actually, I don't know whether it sucks, but here's what sucks about it. Being a good kisser is a great thing, and if you're not, everyone you ever love will hate you. That's a given. There are good kissers, and there are bad kissers (so I hear). But the thing is, you can't practice. I've never slipped anyone the tongue. How will I know what to do? Oh, easy, just read a book about it. Okay, but I'm thinking of the stereotypical comparison of learning to ride a bike. Imagine that you only learn how to ride a bike by reading a book. Then one day, the local volcano erupts, and you need to use your bike to make a speedy escape. You'd better make damn sure you read that book thoroughly.

Okay, so, I decided to go on the non-date which we still had scheduled. I got to restaurant in about half the time I thought it would take, so I was just sitting at a street corner for a while watching the cars and people go by. Behind me was the university, and across the street was the Outside World. A car came out of the university and slowed down as it passed me. The car was full of girls, about four of them. It looked like they were going to ask me for directions, so I got ready to point.

The one in the back on the passenger side spoke: "Excuse me, which way is UF?"

"...It's right behind you," I said, pointing backwards, but they didn't want to hear. They just kept going. Then I said something that they definitely wouldn't have wanted to hear.

Girls, man.

What is it about me that makes me like a human punching bag?

So, anyway, tonight we went to Tijuana Flats -- a "fast casual" Mexican place that I love -- for dinner, with the girl's friend, who I had seen around. We ordered, ate, and had some light conversation. It was rather uneventful, and I had a good feeling that I could have pulled off a nice evening without the extra friend there.

They said they were going to go to a concert afterward, and I didn't really want to do that, but when they said it was on campus, I figured I'd go along. It was at the student union, where there's an amphitheater in front of a lake. It's pretty nice. The first guy had a loud guitar, and he played drums with foot pedals. Other than his singing, he sounded like the White Stripes. The next guy was a little more talented; he played the acoustic guitar and was very rhythmic with it. Finally, there was the headliner: she was the woman who did a lot of the soundtrack for Juno, a movie I actually saw. So some of the songs, sung with her distinctive voice, were familiar. But they were all captivating and entertaining. Her name was Kimya Dawson.

She was very funny, and it turned out that the tour was a family affair: the first guy playing was her husband, and the second was a good friend who got a namecheck in one of the songs in Juno (which prompted his local newspaper to publish a story saying that an area songwriter's name would be mentioned in a song in an upcoming movie). At one point, she had people in the audience raise their hands to request songs. A big group of people raised their hands together, and they requested a song of hers and asked if they could go down and dance to it. She let them. There were about twelve of them, and as she did this moderate-tempo acousting number, they were swing dancing and generally flailing about randomly. Then she asked anybody who had ever dreamed of auditioning for Annie to come down and sing "Tomorrow" with her a cappella. A lot of people did. Finally, a huge number of people came down to dance to her final number, and they continued to swarm around her and give her hugs long after her set ended.

During the set, my non-date and her friend had gotten about four other people to meet up with them, so I was now in a large group. There were a lot of things going on at the student union (they have a whole program of things to do on Friday nights to keep kids from going to parties, I guess), so a few people decided they wanted wax hands. I don't know if you've heard of them, but it's where they dip your hand in wax and then it hardens and you buy it for ten dollars. After waiting in line for an hour even though I didn't want a wax hand, I realized that the night was winding down, so I decided to leave right then. My non-date seemed to understand.