Tuesday, December 23, 2008

That feeling

Do you ever get that feeling at 8 a.m., when you've been up all night reading a really good book and you finish what you've promised yourself is the last chapter before you finally try to get some sleep and the very last paragraph of that chapter makes you utter to yourself, "Well damn, now I have to read the next chapter"?

I like that feeling. I pay for it the next day, but I like it.


-M.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

"No consitutional right is absolute."

Go read all about it.

But don't act surprised. This is only the beginning.


-M.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

End the Fed...

...and grind its bones to make our bread.

How do you teach the group of, er, people who make up the government entity whose purpose is the manipulation of the market that the government manipulating the market is inherently destructive?

You don't. You abolish that entity, posthaste.


-M.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Barney Fwank...

I'm watching Barney on 60 Minutes right now. This entity needs to disappear. Now.

-M.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Snow!

It's snowing. In Houston. It's actually snowing. Right now.

I haven't seen snow since I lived in Denver. God, I missed the white stuff.

I'm going outside in a t-shirt to stand in the parking lot.


-M.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

"No grade given"

So, a weird thing happened to me today.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a short paper for a history course (The American Revolution) at my university. The paper was on Brailyn's book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. I didn't think it was anything special, frankly. I figured I put in enough work for a solid A-, or maybe (horror of horrors) a B+ if the professor was grading particularly hard (which was a possibility, given that this particular professor is a nationally-recognized leading scholar in early American history). What I didn't expect was what happened when my paper was returned to me today.

As we took our final exams, the graded papers were spread out at the front of the classroom to be picked up as we turned in the test and left. I picked mine up as I walked out of the room and came to a dead stop halfway down the hall. "No grade given," it said on the final page of my paper. What the hell?

I waited for the professor until I realized that he had somehow slipped by me while I was discussing the final exam with some other students near the stairs. So, I went up to his office to ask just what exactly was going on with my paper.

I had some ideas, but one awful one was gnawing at the back of my head. One of the comments on the last page of the paper was "Can you prove that you did all of this sophisticated analysis. . .Where did you read and study all of the cited works?" He couldn't think that I didn't actually write this paper myself, could he? Everything was cited, I didn't misrepresent anything, the writing style wasn't inconsistent. But when I finally caught up with him in his office, he informed me that that was indeed what he thought.

It turns out that he had shown the paper to three other colleagues and they had all concurred that there was no way an undergrad wrote a paper that good. He even used the phase "borderline brilliant" when describing it to me.

After several minutes of discussion, during which I apparently thoroughly convinced him that I did indeed write the paper and, on top of that, knew what I was talking about in the paper, he shook my hand and gave me my grade: A.

I really needed this today. Now, it's time for a cigarette and a nap.


-M.

Friday, December 5, 2008

What? No Cheney flogging?

Well, this is infuriating as all hell.

I'm hoping it turns out to be a sick joke.



-M.


(LL: Diana at NoodleFood)