Blog of Billy

Highs of the last week include the Morrissey concert, drinking cold beer on a warm beach, dancing in Mexico, making a bunch of two-day friends, and watching other friends get pierced and tattooed.

Lows include having my money clip disappear, my cassette player in my car breaking, traffic on the Queen Isabelle Memorial Bridge, and having to become a disciplinarian.

Laughing at the trouble is the only way to keep yourself sane, except maybe to yell at it. Don't throw furniture. It's dumb.

There is something I wanted to tell you.
It's so funny, you'll kill yourself laughing,
But then I, I look around, and I remember
that I am alone.

I've been watching myself buy a lot more random DVDs over the last couple of weeks or so. Since the turn of the year, I've become the proud owner of at least three impulse movies. I find this especially odd since I've also been even more entranced than usual by a certain particularly deep, torrentable TV show. Yay for (special) friends of friends and good suggestions.

My favorite Don Knotts memory is the episode of The Muppet Show that he hosted that sported my favorite musical sketch of all time. I never got comfortable with the idea that "Windmills of Your Mind" was supposed to be sung so much slower than that awesome alien thing did.

Also, he's an answer to Sunday's NYT crossword. Patrick, Keia, myself, and two of Keia's friends stayed up until all hours of the morning working to get the last few clever turns of phrase. It took puzzling (rimshot) and fretting, but we bested Will Shortz at his own game. Begone!

Midterms are done! I'm still a little worried about what I made on my engineering one, but on the one that doesn't count, I made a pretty high A. Hopefully that bodes well for that day's conduciveness to test-taking.

Big plans for the break are twofold: Morrissey on Tuesday, then a random road trip down Souf for the rest of the week. See you all on the beach.

OM bhūr bhuvah svah tat savitur varēnyam bhargō dēvasya dhīmahi dhiyō yō nah pracōdayāt

By this point, Lent is the only holiday (season) that I trust. Can you buy "Have a solemn and depriving Lent" cards? Lenten decorations? "Lent" aisle at your local everything-store? Lenten candy? Only if you go to random places online, and that's awesome. There are only two kinds of calendar-based celebrations I can have where I'm not obligated by social pressures to throw money at my happiness: holidays I invent, and Heaton-esque holidays that no one else cares about. The problem with the second group is that precious few of them are actually meaningful, which is where Lent shines. Even outside of the religious connotations (and they're pretty compelling to those of us that buy into them), giving yourself a specified amount of time to spend exercising the self-control that people seem not to be so keen on these days seems like a patently good idea. After giving up caffeine and carbonated beverages and intellectual posturing in previous years, I find myself better able to refrain from the kinds of overindulgence to which I know I'm genetically predisposed. I even try to emulate this process in other parts of the year (cf. my various personal experiments) but that then falls into category 1 of the holidays above, which is not quite as much fun.

You know it's an odd week when you have a Toby Keith song stuck in your head.

So, to help keep myself honest, I'm letting you know that I'm becoming vegetarian for the duration of the season. The logic works like this: there are lots of arguments out there as to why people should be vegetarian, and I've only scratched the surface. I'm going to find out if I need to investigate further by finding out if I'm capable of vegetarianism. My resolve is pretty strong when it needs to be, but I want to make sure that I'm not going to melt from lack of iron or anything. Now, my form of vegetarianism means no flesh of anything that moves under its own power: cow, chicken, fish, squid, etc. Things that are not flesh (Eggs, milk, butter) are still in, as are things that don't move (spinach, nuts, the bedridden elderly). So far, I've had salads, veggie subs, cereal, croissants, and the tastiest spinach artichoke dip in the (un)free world.

Lots of colons today. Also links

The question of the day is then "What good arguments for/against vegetarianism are there?" You should tell me the 1 or 2 really good 2NR kinds of reasons why, if I don't think that I have any moral obligations toward animals that are incapable of engaging in the responsibilities that rights require, I should not eat them. The best arguments I've seen so far come from land use and economic/anti-capitalist sides. The worst ones for me have been the animal rights ones (see above).

Just to see you smile, I'd do anything that you wanted me to.

<Sob> Days of wandering in to everyone's second home will never quite be the same. As of midnight, all the restaurants in Edmond have gone non-smoking. One would thing that for someone who has actually never gotten around to smoking ever in his life, this wouldn't be such a problem, but that kind of thinking denies the intricate ties that bind social groups together. How can I sit for 4 straight hours arguing whether or not a verb can modify a noun if the only people who are capable of holding their own in such a conversation start twitching every quarter hour or so? How can such a perfect combination of wit and substance abuse ever be found again?

How can I have ended Mardi Gras with more beads then when I started? Seems I don't understand the economy of flesh and plastic any better than the one with faith and credit.

Why do I write so many rhetorical questions, when I find them quite distracting while reading?

I'm somewhat optimistic though. With such a broad ban, this will not be like the mass exodus of 63rd at the top of the year. Much more likely is what happened in Montana, where a similar law was implemented last October.

Nearly three months after Denny's posted its no-smoking signs, general manager Tony Choriki still hears the occasional gripe, but the customers - including the smokers - keep coming. . . .

"Now, the same people show up, but they smoke outside," he said. . . .

Here's hoping.

Wonder why a lone wolf don't run with a clan.
Only trust your instincts and be one with the plan.

Oklahoma, in a fit of being itself, decided to snow all this week after being mid-spring warm for the last several weeks. The silver thread running through the snowclouds is that I finally stayed in my apartment long enough to do laundry, including my coats. I'll be warm and not smelling like cat for at least a couple of days.

Again, in a fit of reminding me where I live, someone down at ODOT made the brilliant decision to shut I-240 down to one lane at 4:00 in the <censored> afternoon! How in the world do you justify this kind of stuff during rush hour on one of the most heavily travelled roads in the city? With evil.

For being straight, I sure do spend an awful lot of time at the gay bar. I do get to meet some interesting people, though.

I finally got around to taking some pictures of my cat. I'll upload them soon.

Why does the only reasonably (and actually quite, if a Sam Beckett reference is any indication) intelligent girl in any of my classes also have to be way out of my league?

Our mother has been absent
ever since we founded Rome
but there's gonna be a party
when the wolf comes home.