November - December 1998 Oldproj

Me: "They never log on!"
Sean Smeland: "Do they have a room connection?"
Me: "Yeah ... they're always on."

"Congratulations on getting nailed ... according to Melissa's plan (which is according to you)." -- Avi Kogan

"Subirsection" -- a coinage of Andrew Cohen's from freshman year

"What the hell are you doing? ... And why were you nesting corollaries?" -- Sean

"The median was a 75, so I considered it a good exam. Those of you who were in 223 know my philosophy that the best exam has a median of 50. But that's psychologically unacceptable, so ..." -- Professor Stanley Eisenstat

"And then we'd like it to die so we can go about our business." -- ibid.

Ishai Eshkol, over the phone, after a 3 minute conversation: "Well, thanks very much."
Me, in Japanese: "You're welcome."
Ishai, startled, after a pause, still not knowing which Dan he was speaking with: "How do you know I know Japanese?"
Me: "I'm in your class."

"This message is for those who have not already deleted it!" -- Master Harvey Goldblatt

Sean: "You should come to my house sometime."
Me: "I've been there."
Sean: "With your glasses on!"

"WHEN EVERYONE YOU KNOW HAS BEEN SLAUGHTERED ..." -- excerpt from a TV commercial for a PlayStation game called "Trigger"

Me, to Melissa Harwitt: "So what's up? ... Oh, wait. I called you."

Note to anyone fingering me tonight, Wednesday, 11/4/98: Go outside and look east at Orion and TELL me you've ever seen a clearer night in New Haven in your life.

"I hope your lunch went well. Even if there was no nuclear holocaust." -- Melissa

"> When John Glenn returns from space, everybody dress in ape costumes.
Thank you! You are now the 5th person in less than 24 hours to send this to me." -- Ben Dreyfus, in an e-mail

"My thesis lab ... my senior thesis lab ... senior thesis ... thesis." -- Sean, on the phone, narrowing down the word that the person on the other end was not comprehending

Me, singing along with "You Could Be Mine": "I'm a kid on a motorbike, with my friend who robs ATMs ..."
Sean: "Being followed by a guy in a Mack truck ..."
Me: [spews Sprite]

"What was it I said that made you spew last night?" -- Sean

Sarah Beck, the night before my CS GRE test: "Those 90 questions are yours! Anally rape --"
Me: "Whoa!"
Sarah: "Yeah, whoa ... where was I going there?"

"Wow, I can't believe I did something that confused you on the Pantheon." -- Melissa

"Fruity can doven on my ass Friday night (but in the library more likely). I really wouldn't want them there, anyway." -- Sarah

"Anal rape is not recommended. The Young Israel House at Yale does not condone anal rape." -- Sarah

"... to the right of our 'computer'." -- Sarah, referring to the KK's PS/2

Me: "I don't think I'll ever be dating anyone."
Sarah: "[You mean] at least you haven't gotten any offers from Mars yet. I don't know what [xxxxx] was thinking in not being interested. She must be a lesbian."

"By the way, I thought that Jon and God made a good couple." -- Me

"I do not know the man, but joking aside, he does not seem a ben Adam." -- Sarah

Me: "Then we shall talk again soon ... on the plains of Moab or somewhere thereabouts?"
Sarah: "Hey, I'm FROM Moab!"

"Nap time for Grossman-san." -- Alan Lee-san, at my hyperness in Japanese class

Reuben Silverman: "What's a vector space, in general?"
Professor Efim Zelmanov, laughing impishly and offering little help: "A module over a field!"

"When is that false? When there's zombies?" -- Andy K., in CS323

Shmuel Nadata: "When does it tell you about children who aren't yours?"
Prof. Eisenstat: "It won't."
Shmuel: "So why do we have to check?"
Prof. Eisenstat: "Because you can have children you don't know about!"

"I think it's either zero or nonzero." -- Prof. Eisenstat

Me: "If I had breasts, I would just sit around and play with them all the time."
Melissa, feeling the back of my head: "This is much cooler than breasts."
Kate and Me: [wide-eyed, open-mouthed, questioning stare]
Melissa: "Maybe that's just because I've had almost 21 years to play with mine."

"The way the problem is formulated, we have only the sequences. We don't have the tree, we don't have the probabilities, we don't have the original sequence. We have nothing." -- Professor Ming-Yang Kao

Prof. Kao, in response to a suggested solution: "Yes, that's a very interesting approach. ... Let's try something different."
Class: [laughs]
Prof. Kao: "You have to understand this: all ideas are interesting; you just have to find a problem for them."

"... and the log of negative one -- that's really bad." -- Professor Kao

"The trick is ... hmm, what's the trick?" -- ibid., pondering a problem

"I can't remember if that's Jerry Cab's number or Sarah Beck's number." -- Me

"The world must know the tragedy in Honduras is of biblical proportions." -- Tipper Gore (umm ... don't think so, Tipper)

"Magnetic butt." -- random Yale undergrad, as I opened Pierson Gate

"We have the Backside Boys." -- Maruti Racherla, just plain getting it wrong

"Seeing a beautiful woman is like bringing a stereogram into focus: your eyes will strain to do so, but when it finally happens, it brings the most profound sense of relaxation and peace." -- Me

"And zero isn't negative one ... " -- Prof. Zelmanov

Andy: "What about ... what about flags to arguments?"
Prof. Eisenstat, playing dumb: "What are flags?"
Andy, uncertainly: "I don't know."
Prof. Eisenstat: "I don't know either. If you find out, tell me."

Prof. Eisenstat: "How many think it's going to work?"
[Two people out of 40 raise their hands.]
Prof. Eisenstat: "How many think it's going to fail?"
[Three people raise their hands.]
Prof. Eisenstat: "Why is it going to fail?"
Shmuel: "Because you're smiling."

"And, being philosophers, they're perfectly content to wait, and they die of starvation." -- Prof. Eisenstat

[mharwitt] my ph skills are limited
[grossman] mine are AWESOME!!!!!!!!

Laura Palmer: "He's a frail, little old man."
Me: "Really? ... I don't know what he looks like."
Laura, impishly: "He's a frail, little old man."

"Next week marks a period of transition in my life. It will be the last night I race down through Silliman, desperately trying various entryway doors in my frantic attempt to make it to Silliflicks before Babylon 5 starts." -- Will

Sean: "But Hanif doesn't exist. After three years, you should know this by now."
Me: "But he USED to exist. And in big, bold letters too!"

"Wow ... it's important to know how to cheat." -- Prof. Kao

"Constantly reassuring you that these people suck makes it sound like I/we suck, or, at best, like we have only one word in our vocabulary. ... But yet: they suck. With a very strong suction." -- Sarah

"Hey. ... Sorry if I woke you up. I found your pants." -- Keith, over the phone, in the Glee Club office, at 1:47 AM

"Glad glee's good. But love's labour's lost? Sucks squirrel semen. Enough annoying alliteration." -- Peter Kaplan

"08-W 06-D OPEN" -- console in PC laundry room (which only has 7 washers)

Me, as Sean loads the Warcraft II CD into the CD player: "Oh! Dan's migraine is going to die!"
Sean, surprised and elated: "Really?"
Me: "No, actually, 'kill' was the verb I was going for there."

"If x is a student, and a is a polynomial, you may ask what it means to multiply a student by a polynomial. It doesn't mean anything." -- Prof. Zelmanov

"x's are just decorations." -- ibid.

"X could be a pack of dogs ... any set." -- ibid.

"Say what?" -- Prof. Eisenstat, re a student's REALLY false statement

"This is P's side of the house, this is Q's side of the house, and this is Time." -- ibid., drawing a completely ineffective picture on the board

"Man, woman!!!" -- Sean, being contradictory

"The oil is back in the hands of its rightful owner, so if any of you are feeling cramped ..." -- Me, on the message board of the girls next door

"Well, sex or not, I still have dibs on your bed." -- Sean, on the phone, to Melissa Mizell

"Seg fault. Core dumped." -- message displayed by the Zoo laser printer

B5 fan: "Do you know what a vacation is?"
JMS: "Does it have fur?"

"Interesting note...I've now heard from about a dozen people who've seen 'Sleeping in Light' (critics and friends of critics who got advance copies). And with at most one or two exceptions, every single one of them has been doing the same thing: running the last 8 minutes or so (from the start of act 4 through to the very end credits) over and over and over, 5-6 times or more. I find that interesting because that's *exactly* what I've been doing with it since getting the final tape in my hands. I'm not sure exactly what motivates it, but there's something going on there that hits home across the board. I was astonished to hear that others were doing the same thing I was in this respect. Will be curious to see if others have the same reaction." -- JMS newsgroup post

B5 fan: "I don't want to say goodbye."
JMS: "Me either."

"... and let the child de-zombify. [1] ... Footnote [1]. This means that the child is completely laid to rest and is no longer a zombie." -- from "UNIX for Programmers and Users -- A Complete Guide", by Graham Glass

"Do I even have a child?" -- Jennifer

"How do we execute the children?" -- ibid.

Me, typing in UNIX, talking to Jennifer: "Here's a list of all the people I care about in the world."
UNIX: [displays empty list]

"Well, the Pantheon isn't a porn site ... more or less." -- Shawn Bayern

Brian: "Where does the 3, 4, 5 come in?"
Shawn: "Well, they're after the 0, 1, 2."

"The officials now make it ... official." -- Yale Radio announcer, calling Bartholomew's fumble at the end of the third quarter of The Game

"I feel like my goal when writing with you is to get a multiple-smiley :)." -- Melissa

[grossman] just milk and Shreddies
[mharwitt] I've never heard someone abbreviate a cereal before
[grossman] no -- ha ha ha! ... Shreddies is a cereal
[mharwitt] oh ... I thought you meant shredded wheat
[mharwitt] but you were on such good terms with it,
[mharwitt] that you called it by a nickname

"You should add 'gives [really] good massages' to your dating resume." -- Shana Katz

"Otherwise, want to get together sometime and iimasu some nihongo?" -- Me

"Cool. I'll be there at 3:30 then. We'll get huge." -- Lee-san, setting up a time to meet at the gym

Me: "Did you eat breakfast yet?"
Sean, impatiently: "Yes."
Me: "Go have breakfast! Wait, you already had breakfast."

"No one knew from whence I came or how the hell I knew about the banana." -- Shana

"Why do people care what their portraits look like? I can understand caring about what you look like, but not what your portrait looks like. If you look good, then your portrait will look good. ... As opposed to [mine]." -- Me

"There are advantages to not being the Messiah." -- Sean

"I suddenly realized that Sean wasn't standing there anymore, and then Frank and I looked around, and we were like, 'Wait, Hanif's gone too' ... 'and Dan', and so we knew something was up." --Melissa M., regarding our pranks during the Yale-Harvard Glee Club concert

"... where Macaulay Culkin is walking through the snow like that, with his feet." -- Anne Meyer

"I'll beep-beep your ass!" -- psycho bicyclist woman on Chapel Street, after a car honked at her

"Nancy America Santos Levy" -- one of the more interesting names I've seen in the Ph server

Sean: "Yeah, yeah ... my butt's a Babylon station."
Me, skeptically: "I ... really beg to differ."
Sean, third-world-nation-ly: "It's got a lotta firepower."

Me: "We shouldn't discuss formulations that the English language is not meant to accept."
Sean: "It's a shame we're not speaking in German, because it's a higher-level language."
Me: "It's a shame we're not speaking in Sioux Indian, --"
Sean: "Because they have only a few words, [closing his eyes] but they have LOTS of visions, and everything's perfectly clear."
Me: "Yeah, they have only a few words, but a lot of marijuana."
Sean: "They have much ganja. Much wampum."
Me: "You say teepee; I say crackhouse."

Confused Math 350 student: "How did you use --?"
Prof. Zelmanov: "So far, I haven't used anything!"

Jared, hesitantly suggesting a partial solution: "Plus."
Prof. Kao: "Plus! Okay, that's a good idea!"

"Uh, sorry ... I said nonsense." -- Prof. Zelmanov

"There's a slight problem with implementing this, of course, because we don't know what's going to happen in the future." -- Prof. Eisenstat

"You know, in computer science there's all kinds of crazy ideas, and some of them actually work." -- Prof. Kao

"The deadline is December 7, but you'll accept it any time that week; you just won't be happy about it. But that won't be reflected in the grade." -- Rebecca S., suggesting a lateness policy for our final project in CS 468a

"Some parts of this course you can forget. We are not all mathematicians. If you are studying ecology, you don't need to remember that every submodule of a finitely generated free module over a Euclidean domain is finitely generated." -- Prof. Zelmanov, in Math 350 (Abstract Algebra)

"A really REALLY smart C compiler, also known as a human being with a dumb C compiler as an adjunct ..." -- Prof. Eisenstat

"Applications received less than three weeks prior to the first day of instruction will not be accepted." -- notice on application to UIUC

Five years ago, I began watching a very good story. Its final episode ended just a few moments ago. Nearly 41 years old, and yet I spent the last hour watching a television through teary eyes. Damn you ... and thank you.

(Quoting JMS in 1994:) "Like you, it is my abiding hope, and my fervent belief, that B5 will run its full course and tell the story that I want to tell. When the last frame is finally shown, nothing would please me more than for people to simply say, 'That was a good story.'" That was a good story.

"I don't think there's ever been this kind of interplay between the viewers and creators of a show." It's never been done before; and likely won't again, at least for a long time. But the interaction, for me, has been worth it.

... Thanks, I appreciate that. I do sometimes think they're not looking as hard as they should be. There's a lot going on under the surface, as you point out. When Van Gogh first showed his work to Gaugain, Gaugain said, 'You paint too fast.' Van Gogh replied, 'No, you LOOK too fast.'

"I don't intend to sound like I'm placing you on a pedestal but do you think that in years to come film and language students of all ages will study Babylon 5 In the same way that our generation studies the works of Shakespeare and even the authors you have paid homage to, such as George Orwell and Isaac Asimov? The deep and complex storyline I think warrants a fair bit of academic analysis." Actually, that's already started. A number of academic essays on B5 have been collected in The Parliament of Dreams, published in the UK (I think someone here may have the info on purchasing it). I found in reading it that I was smarter, stupider, more liberal, more conservative, more progressive, more reactionary, than I had previously imagined. Such analysis (and it was/is good reading, btw) is flattering, sometimes daunting, but brings out stuff always worth considering. Whether the subject matter is in the long run truly worth the ink, only history can tell. Obviously I think so, but again, I have a vested interest in saying that.

"Who are you? What do you want? Where are you going? These questions of yours have had an unexpected effect on me. Changed me in ways I'm still trying to figure out. So I have to ask: In the last five+ years, have you, yourself, found answers to any of these questions?" Yes, but they keep changing. Maybe they're supposed to.

"I want to thank you for your integrity, your courage, and your perseverance. I want to thank you for bringing intelligence, thought, and a remarkable amount of depth to televison. Thank you for your knowledge of the classics and for your incredible gifts of synthesis and storytelling. Thank you for ancient archetypes and Aeschylian motifs made to speak to the present from the future. But most of all, thank you for daring to share these gifts and for five years of hard work." Thank you, and I hope that someday I can be worthy of such wonderful words and comparisons. But to my eyes, I still got a long, long way to go to keep getting better as a writer.

"Sean Smeland and Dan Grossman, despite paying for separate cabins on the ship, decided that a wall between them was one too many, and so Sean moved in with Dan." -- Sean's and my senior prediction at the PC holiday dinner

"They need to score a touchdown. Obviously, a field goal is not an option." -- WFAN announcer, re the Seahawks' last play, on their own 25

"How'd you do that well knowing so little?" -- Rebecca S., re my CS GRE score

"I got to know those guys [the AMTRAK workers] so well that they let me wear the conductor's cap. Of course, that was after forty-SEVEN Heinekens." -- Lapatino, on WPLR