February - April 1998 Oldproj

Sean Smeland: "Dude, why is my nipple hard?"
Me: "Can I put that on my plan ... PLEASE?"

Sean, shaking his HIGH SCHOOL cross-country jacket and observing something fall out of it: "Oh, YES!!!! Want a Krackel?"

Footnote in CNA's Summary of Insurance Provisions: "'Loss' as used above with reference to hand or foot means complete severance through or above the wrist or ankle joint; as used with reference to thumb and index finger means complete severance through or above metacarpophalangeal joints; as used with reference to eye means the irrecoverable loss in the entire sight thereof; and with reference to speech and hearing, entire and irrecoverable loss."

"You should be able to major in applied philosophy." -- Lindsey Ricker

Me: "Dude, this girl has problems."
Sean: "Let's review. She had dinner with Dave Ross."

"What do hyphenated people do about their kids?" -- Rabbi Michael Whitman

"What's so Kosher about the Kosher Kitchen? We don't let infidels like you desecrate the Lord's Passover, that's what." -- Me, to another Jew (who fancies herself more religious and more important to the cosmos than she actually is)

"My musical talent is very limited. If I tried to join the Russian Chorus or something like that, I would not make it." -- Professor Ronnie Lee

"If your grandmother suddenly became an Elvis impersonator ..." -- Professor James Aspnes

"That's not called 'metaphysical play'; that's called 'not happening'." -- Elizabeth Saunders

"When the sexual tension is so thick that you have to do breaststroke to get across the room ... " -- Sean

"I love people who know me ... it's great." -- Elizabeth

"We could use more girls. ... Well, who couldn't?" -- Isaac

"Ever since eighth grade I've hated lambda." -- Sean

Me, waving my foot in the air: "It's a lot of fun to go like this."
Sean: "It's also a lot of fun to crap if you're that kind of person."

"Does she always have that Egg?" -- CS223 student, referring to Clara

Sean, pointing to my bed:
Me: "It's a FIRST DATE!"
Sean:
Me: "You don't fuck a girl on the first date, even if she IS Orthodox ..." [turning to load up Telnet, ashamed] "Oh, my God ... "

"Sorry, external fingers are not permitted." -- the unfriendly UNIX server at NYU

"Not surprisingly, grade inflation exists mostly in arts and humanities departments where there is often no 'right' answer. (Either E=mc^2 or it doesn't; there's not a whole lot open for interpretation there.)" -- from Abby Ellin's "Grades: A Short History of the Academic Nielsen Rating"

"How does he look at that clock and say he's 'about to' run out of time? His definition of 'about to' is very different from mine." -- Clara, three minutes after the end of class

"And I don't know what it is, and I don't want to know what it is, because if I knew what it was, I'd know what it is." -- Professor Stanley Eisenstat

"Take me home to your religion for the night." -- Boston

Sean: "Maybe she takes her coffee black ... like she takes her men."
Me, after a second, quietly: "Daaamn!"
Sean, also quietly: "Hey!"

"But being hit with a tuna isn't nearly as bad as having a piranha take a chunk out of your arm on the way past." -- Sean

"Or you could tie [a piranha] to the end of a whip ..." -- Sean

"And the truth is that being bludgeoned by a piranha wouldn't be too cool either, because a piranha's a pretty big fish." -- Sean

Me: "Well, you know how in Predator II he's got that cool blade that cuts through cows really well in that meat freezer? Well, we were thinking that you could do the same thing with a piranha, but only if you could control it. So, you know, you'd have to have a rocket strapped to its back or something."
Mike: "Why?"
Me: "Well, because you know how if you have a waterproof bazooka or something you can hide under the water and jump up and go 'frshoom' and kill someone? Well, if you have an UNDERwater enemy, this way you could, like, lean out of your boat, half underwater, and launch a piranha at them."

"Yes, but what the hell would Sardaukar be doing on Giedi Prime? ... What the hell would YOU be doing on Giedi Prime?" -- Me

Me, after Hanif Peters-Davis shoots for the garbage can and misses: "And you call yourself a Negro."
Hanif: "Hey, shut up!"

"Somebody's MOTHER! ... I'm not quite sure whose." -- Clara

Sarah's email #1: "Sweet Christ."
Sarah's email #2: "No, wait, I need to express myself more fully. Dude, are you for real?"

"Steady as she goes! (or comes, as the case may be)" -- Sarah, being vile

"... in the same fashion that the Japanese saying, 'We'll think about it,' means, 'Hell no.'" -- Sean

"... And a vegitarian!" -- found on the plan of eds7, who happens to be an adamant v-e-g-e-t-a-r-i-a-n

Me: "They're MY quarters."
Sean: "No, they're MY quarters."
Me: "Okay, they're your quarters."

Me, composing a love letter: "Had I a million ships ..."
Sean, trying to help: "... I would make sweet love to you."

Sean: "Which, if she knows anything about sailing, she'll understand."
Me: "... I don't think she does."
Sean: "Why not?"
Me: "Dude, she's ORTHODOX. They don't do that kind of thing."
Sean: "Of course Jews sail. How do you think they got here?"
Me: "... Not by sailing."
Sean: "Dude, there were Jews on the MAYFLOWER."
Me: "There was my ASS on the Mayflower."
Sean: "No, your ass wasn't born yet."

"It's not that I don't trust you; it's just that I don't ... trust ... you." -- Captain Lochley, on Babylon 5

"I love random food that I don't know I have. That's the best thing in the world." -- Peter Kaplan

Me: "... I wish someone would hand me a gun on a silver platter."
Shana Katz: "I own a shotgun; it hasn't helped me yet."
Me: "Have you ever shot anyone with it?"
Shana: [shakes her head]
Me: "There's your problem!"

Commander Ivanova, speaking through tears: "I just -- You know all my life I've had, I've had problems with relationships. You may have noticed."
Doctor Franklin: " ... A little."
Ivanova: [laughs sardonically and continues, chokingly] "You know, the ones that I loved always ended up hurting me, leaving me. And the ones who stayed, they had nothing inside, no depth. After a while I just decided to forget about it. And here was Marcus. I knew he'd never hurt me and I knew he'd never leave me and I knew he loved me. I knew it and I just didn't want to admit it. And he gave so much and he wanted so little in return. He just wanted a kind word or a smile and all I ever gave him in two years was grief. And that's because I think I saw what I wanted and I was afraid."
Franklin: "But you knew it wasn't going to work out. You were just protecting yourself from being hurt again and that's all."
Ivanova: "Maybe, but maybe I should have just tried one more time. I could have done that for him; now I can't. ... At least I should have boffed him just once."
Franklin, snickering: "Boffed? ... Did you just say 'boffed'?"
Ivanova: "... That's the type of thing he would have said. I mean, what the hell. It's not like I was doing anything else."
Franklin: "Well I guess that's one way to deal with unrequited love, huh?"
Ivanova: "... All love is unrequited Steven ... all of it." [Ivanova moves over to Franklin, who holds her as she cries.]

Prof. Aspnes: "I can't predict whether there will be a dynamic programming problem on the midterm."
Student: "Yes, you can."
Prof. Aspnes: "Well, yes, but only because I have the power to make my prediction come true. There's a difference between being able to predict the future and being able to control the future."

"Because chickens don't need gold -- except for the ones who lay golden eggs who are from a different problem." -- Prof. Aspnes

"Any questions about this derivation that I horribly garbled here?" -- ibid.

"If this is from Harvey, I'm going to be really upset. ... It's from Harvey." -- Me, opening my INBOX

Me: "This God scares me."
Sean: "What?"
Me: "This God scares me."
Sean: "Ska?"
Me: "This GOD scares me!"
Sean: "Oh, this GOD. I like the God. God's cool! Especially the eyes. ... And the cracks are kind of cool."

"You're quite right in that Clara's last name is Sturges." -- Sean

Sean: "Dude, the pitcher would only be scared if you had a REALLY long range ..."
Me: "... or a really long penis."

"Let me say it ... correctly." -- Prof. Lee

"What makes this guy so powerful is that he's really good friends with the existential quantifier." -- Prof. Aspnes

"... he tells me, 'Sure, four is composite. It's ten times twelve!' So I sit down and work it out and find that this doesn't entirely work ..." -- ibid.

"We say, 'Hey, we need a hint here. ... We need the answer to the problem.'" -- ibid.

"This guy knows the answer is 'No', and THIS guy knows the answer is 'Yes'. We know one of them knows the answer, but that doesn't really help us." -- ibid.

"It's better than pulling a rabbit out of a hat. I'm actually going to be turning a hat INTO a rabbit." -- ibid.

Sean: "Don't be dejected about it. Be focused and dynamic."
Me: [burps ... loudly]
Sean: "No ... focused and dynamic, not gaseous."

Me: "Dude, you have problems."
Sean: "I have problems? Dude, you're the one whose brownie's huge!"

[ssmeland] With Saudners
[grossman] Snausages? who's Saudners?
[ssmeland] Elizabteh Douglsa
[grossman] :)

"You can tell me anything ... just make sure YOU know what you're talking about." -- Chao Sensei, after someone mistakenly told her in Japanese that he had been married

Denitza Blagev, attempting to translate from Japanese: "Wait! ... They're eight and three and they're getting married at Christmas???"
Me: "The more operative thing is that they're brother and sister!"
Chao Sensei: "These days, anything can happen."

"MULTITASK DAMMIT!!! WHAT KIND OF A COMPUTER MAJOR ARE YOU???" -- Elizabeth

[sdk23] see?
[sdk23] why?
[grossman] what?
[sdk23] we

Me: "I'm not afraid of flying; I just get sick on planes."
Shana: "I'm not afraid of flying, just bureaucracy."

Me: "Less Hanson ... more Gloria."
Sean: "Yeah, baby! That's the way life SHOULD be."

"BAN PORK" -- Seen on an Illinois license plate

"My sperm count is so low ... I can't even adopt." -- Garry Shandling, on "The Tonight Show"

Phillipino Man: "You are from United States, no?"
Canadian Tourist: "Well, actually, I'm from Canada. It's like an American, but without a gun."

Detective Lanz: "Someone put two bullets through his head."
Suspect: "Max is ... is dead?"
Detective Lorenzo: "That's the natural progression of things, yes."

"Cryptography -- the only branch of mathematics that is legally equivalent to a hand grenade." -- Prof. Aspnes

"... involved sending people into a sinking submarine. That's what submarines DO, but this one wasn't doing it in the right way." -- ibid.

"So a typewriter was this device people used before word processors." -- ibid.

"After they got over that initial rush of saying, 'Wow, this number doesn't have any factors!' ..." -- ibid.

"Number-theoretic type fenageling ... " -- ibid.

Sean (to the tune of Tori Amos's "Crucify"): "Why do we crucify our gels?"
Elizabeth: "Because they suck."

Sarah, coming into the middle of a conversation: "You need an acronym?"
Sean, wondering what the hell Sarah's talking about: "No. We're good."
Sarah: "Oh, it's just that you looked like a man in dire need of an acronym."

"Dan making an attempt to stand on two feet, or what was that?" -- Elizabeth, during a clumsy moment of mine

"We find that 11 divided by 4 is 19, which is a little surprising ..." -- Prof. Aspnes

"Q is, by convention, prime ... [making a Q with his extremities] ... because it's a got a prime sticking out the bottom of it.... Yeah, so anyway ..." -- ibid.

"... who, sadly, were not Chinese, though they probably should have been." -- ibid.

Student #1: "When will you be doing this?"
Student #2: "Nine-ish."
Student #1: "Does this 'nine-ish' mean 'eleven-ish' or ... ?"

"That is quite possibly the most moronic thing I have ever witnessed in my entire life." -- Jeremy Clain, referring to a REALLY dumb bug in my program that I had overlooked for over an hour

"What's riboflavin? Is that pork?" -- Reuben Silverman, judging the kashrut level of a bag of Chunky Chips Ahoy

Clara, documenting her program: "Author, Clara Sturges. [She thinks for a second and then deletes that.] Dan Grossman."
Me: "That's okay. I just got mine from Zach. It's recursive. Zach is the base case."

"You don't need to be prescient to notice flesh on your walls." -- Sean

Me: "Now that you've finished your world championship ballroom performance, what are you going to do now?"
Clara: "I'm gonna go to services on Friday night!"

"Given the space between her ... ummm ... ahhh ... assets ..." -- Sean

"Hmmm ... I just erased the thing I wanted to explain." -- Prof. Lee

"So I'm very, very smart ..." -- ibid.

"Edward the Confessor COULD have been the father, but actually I'm probably getting these guys out of order by at least three centuries." -- Prof. Aspnes

"If you have a time machine, then you can have cyclic family trees." -- ibid.

"That was simple depth-first search. Now I want to do the extended dance mix version of depth-first search." -- ibid.

"Remember our really horrible-looking binary tree ... also known as a linked-list?" -- Prof. Eisenstat

"Trees are short and bushy." -- ibid.

"Wait, wait ... go back to Dan liking fuzzy women." -- Shana

"... I'll rip your lungs out through your nostrils." -- Jamie Barker, a while ago

"Join the army, they said. See the world, they said. I'd rather be sailing." -- Footman (guess whose old emails I've been rereading!)

"Never may!" -- Sean and I, impersonating James Hetfield (poorly)

"And the little boy stands up and says, 'I'm not getting on the lifeboat until my grandpa does because he's the only one who knows how to change my diapers.' ... But this is a ridiculous example." -- Prof. Aspnes

"Proof: squint at picture and flap hands." -- ibid., being rigorous

"... and you have to hire an army of small children to push you up the mountain, so it can get very expensive." -- ibid.

"... but going down the mountain to the bottom of the drained Long Island Sound could actually give you a negative cost because the momentum you gain from whizzing down the mountain could allow you to coast all the way back up to New Haven, presuming you make that hairpin turn in the mud at the bottom of the Sound around the wreckage of TWA Flight 800 ..." -- ibid.

"You kids don't know how good you have it these days. Back in my day if you wanted to get to the FTP server, you had to walk. Uphill. Both ways." -- ibid.

"I'm gonna have to get me one of those. I mean, now you have total control over the class, whoever owns that." -- ibid., referring to a watch that had been going off at about 3:43 for the last three classes or so

"Is that right? Anybody remember? Anybody do the reading?" -- Prof. Eisenstat

Me (Sunday at 6:45pm): "Wait. Why the hell is it so light out? It's never light out when we leave Yorkside."
Anne Meyer: "Don't you think there's a correlation between what happened last night and now?"
Me (clueless): "Huh? What are you talking about? ... [realization slowly seeps into my brain] ... Oh! Right! I totally forgot what the meaning of Daylight Savings Time was! I just set my clock and forgot about it."

"Sean, you have KILLER hips." -- Sharat

"Are you sure he didn't get someone to die FOR him?" -- Hanif, upon hearing that Rob Pilatus had died

[alternatively]

"Nobody is dead. Milli Vanilli will soon return to the music scene just as popular as before (cough...cough). Fab (or was it Rob?) was 'drug-synching,' a process that looks much like real drug use. He was taking 'Girl, you know it's cocaine,' not the real stuff. Indeed, somebody else died, and Fab is simply taking the credit and lying very, very still. Unfortunately, the casket started skipping right in the middle of the performance and he was found out." -- Brian Tippy

"Ahh, who cares? Kill the bitches anyway." -- Sean, upon reading a news article about a breakthrough in breast cancer research

"Oh, jeez ... did I say that? I seem to have lost the capacity for inner dialogue." -- Sean, a moment later, after receiving an interesting look from me, known affectionately to some of you as a Krulic

Me, seeing Sean try to feed a graham cracker to his stuffed bear: "Sean, he's lacking in orifices."
Sean, ramming the cracker against the bear's face: "Not for long!"

Me: "Who wrote this?"
Shana: "Gerard Vieznor."
Me: "Does he have an Indian name?"
Sean: "Dances With Phallus, apparently."

Me, updating my .project: "Did you say 'Dances With Penis' or 'Dances With Phallus'?"
Sean: "'Dances With Phallus'."
Me: "Is the 'With' capitalized?"

[ followers of sdk23's plan should note that the marshmallow chicks may win out in numbers, but are not even close to as well-crucified as our brownie was ]

"So the parakeet dies, and you know that somewhere in the graph is a negative-weight cycle." -- Prof. Aspnes

"Tubes were these antique electrical devices kind of like light bulbs." -- ibid.

"If the Oracle says, 'Ouch!' then you can say, 'Oh, I guess that was part of your body.'" -- ibid.

Sean: "This is your window of opportunity! You can move in ... like a tiger and its prey ... like a lion moving in on a slow antelope!"
Me: "A VERY slow antelope."

"Yeah, THAT'S the way to a woman's heart. Stutter!" -- Sean

"So she'll be talking about how her day was or how she's feeling, and he'll just seem to not particularly care." -- Sean

"What the frick? 'Wash me'?!?! Is that what you just wrote?!" -- Sean

Me: "What are you saying?"
Elana, referring to my recent attempts to woo a woman: "You're so ... bold!"
Me, poking my neck: "Am I A1 Bold? Do I get you heeah, and right back heeah?"