December - March 1999 Oldproj

"Listen. When you get rich and powerful like Gates, I want stock, you bastard." -- ibid.

"Things didn't go the way perhaps some people thought they might." -- ESPN golf sportscaster

"It is hard to imagine that he would put anything of his own in the mouth of someone so dense." -- Sarah Beck, writing on Hegel

Tom Brokaw: Let me ask you, as a former professor, to grade your tenure as Secretary of State.
Madeleine Albright: I would give myself probably a B and good effort, hard work, needs to have more results.

Breton: "I hate writing papers."
Me: "What are you writing on, Breton?"
Breton: "The history of welding at the turn of the century."

Me, in the voice of the old black bus driver from the Spizzwinks(?) most recent album: "You call that singin'? Hell, that SUCKED!"
Sean Smeland, similarly: "You call that singin'? Hell, that was scary! I just shit my pants!"

"Kill everyone and defile their bodies," -- Sarah's signature line

"Don't jump out of a building, though. That would be a waste of perfectly good organs that could save other people's lives and a brain that is definitely of laboratory quality." -- Brian Wahlert, in an email freshman year

"Nuclear weapons are not good for children and other living things. They melt children and other living things." -- Professor Jerome Bracken, on davisj's .plan

B5 Fan: "What do you think of Howard Stern being a big fan of the show?"
J. Michael Straczynski: "We are proud of all our fans."

"So what does the future hold for AI? Can Artificial intelligence even be achieved? These questions were about as hard for me to tackle as it was for this year's football team to make a tackle." -- from Priscilla Trevino's CS senior thesis abstract, Spring 1998

"Fight the enemies of God, enemies of the nation, enemies of humanity." -- Saddam Hussein, STILL unclear on the concept of Tomahawk cruise missiles

"For us to initiate military action during Ramadan would be profoundly offensive to the Arab world. ... That is something we very much wanted to avoid." -- President Clinton (I would add some disparaging comment here, but, damn it, anyone who doesn't see the humor here just won't get it with any amount of explanation)

"Can't go to a movie the first week it come out -- why? Cause niggaz are shooting at the screen! What kinda ignorant shit is that? 'Man, this a good movie! It's so good, I gotta bust a cap in here!'" -- Chris Rock

Ramadan To Begin Tomorrow
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) -- The Saudi Royal palace has announced that a new moon had been sighted, signaling the holy fasting month of Ramadan will begin tomorrow. Ramadan marks God's revelation of the Koran, Islam's holy book, to the Prophet Mohammed some 1,400 years ago.
-- wow ... those are some pretty good telescopes if they can see new moons ... I gotsta get me one of those

"TeX, pronounced properly, rhymes with 'blecchhh.'" -- TeX man page

Brian, leaving ST-Insurrection: "So, the Federation's the good guys?"
Paul Kawka and Me: "Yeah."
Brian (not quite as big a Star Trek fan as we): "It took me a while to figure that out."

"The roads are going to be real bad, so if people have not done what they need to do, they probably won't be able to do it before Christmas." -- Dewey Walston, National Weather Service meteorologist

Nigel: "You don't want to go to Cornell. It's a wasteland out there. ... Well, I guess if you stay inside ..."
Me: "Well, I LIKE the cold. [pointing towards 59th street] You ever been out on the Midway in the winter?"
Nigel: "Yeah, but at least that's Chicago. Imagine if the whole PLACE was the Midway."

"condemned to death" -- IWFotD (place the accent on "demned"; funny, no?)

"On behalf of Gizmo, I am offended. As Doc would say, my DOG knows Gizmo was not a Gremlin! He was a Mogwai!" -- Sean, being pedantic

"Removing this ZIP drive without first shutting down the Mac will eventually destroy the Mac or the drive." -- University of Chicago computer cluster sign

"Drop it into the end of a sock and use it to beat carolers." -- suggested use for a fruitcake (from Oracle)

"While formatting is not crucial to me, I would like to submit a Statement of Purpose in SOME form. It might help my application." -- Me, to the guy in charge of UW-Madison's online application form, which was rejecting my statement of purpose as being too long (which it wasn't)

"Nathan Lord Haydn Willard" -- new "Most Interesting Name" I've seen in the Ph server

"Brett JamiesonMcFarla Libresco" -- shit, scratch the above

"Remember: stressed spelled backwards spells desserts." -- from Oracle

Clara Sturges: "Is this the Adam you kiss?"
Dani Snyder: "No, this is the really platonic Adam, as opposed to the theoretically platonic Adam."

Me: "Why did they come to burn him?"
Anne Meyer, tentatively: "Because he's got more paper?"

"No, this is 'it's your birthday'; THIS is 'sex with teacher'." -- Me, waving my arms lewdly

"... as if a) he had anything of value to say, b) were actually a carbon based life form, instead of a juvenile troll in need of attention ..." -- JMS

"The Markov frog, if you will." -- Professor David Pollard

"What can you say about that chicken? Eventually, he's going to be roadkill, isn't he?" -- ibid.

"The probability of success, or being hit by a truck, is ..." -- ibid.

"Once you've won, I'm not going to toss the coin again and say, 'You've still won!'" -- ibid.

"I think we should divulge our Shelbys." -- Anne

[grossman] You said "that the first real woman contender for President is a female"
[ameyer] I meant "is a Republican"

"... and Shelby, NC, IS out of my butt." -- Anne

Michael Jordan Retires
CHICAGO (AP) -- Michael Jordan, the NBA's greatest player, made it official today, retiring from the Chicago Bulls after 13 seasons and six championships. But he left open the slightest possibility that he might come back. Jordan said he was ``99.9 percent'' sure he would never return and added, ``You can read that for what it's worth. ... I'm very secure in my decision.'' The Jordan era included five MVP awards, 10 scoring titles and 12 All-Star appearances.
1/13/99

Sean: "I don't want to remove my skin."
Me: "Weenie."
Sean: "I'm thrifty!"

"Yes, but not everything that we eat and drink and breathe was lying on the windowsill and had to be scraped off." -- Lizzie Oldfather

"Shit -- a black woman that got two kids, going to work every day, bustin' her ass, HATES the bitch with nine kids getting a welfare check cause they can't stop fucking! Stop fucking! STOP IT! PUT THE DICK DOWN! Put it DOWN!" -- Chris Rock

"My job is to create the graphical tools that will allow them to both manually and automatically allocate weapons to aimpoints in an efficient and user-friendly environment." -- a woman at Sandia National Labs

"Butt permeates." -- Me

Me: "But you only have one clean pair of socks left."
Elizabeth Saunders: "I've just come from the rainforest; I don't really care."

Judge Makes Clinton Remark
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- An abortion rights case erupted into calls for a mistrial today when a federal judge told a witness: ``Truthful means truthful.... This is not a Clinton deposition!'' Judge Robert E. Jones quickly apologized for what he described as a jest at the end of a long week of testimony. The defense asked for a mistrial, which Jones denied.

"Oh, shoot! I have to read Torah next weekend. Jesus!" -- Me

"atatakakattari" -- word of the week in Japanese 119

"What you do is use the method of circular reasoning. You figure out your answer and then you go back and [use it to figure out your answer]. Well, you can do that, or you can actually solve the equation." -- Professor Pollard

"All right, so, I'm sure you all want to go home now." -- ibid., at 2:15

"Space for Free Jewish Women?" -- subject line in a Kosher Kitchen e-mail

"But if little n equals big N then we can all go home because there's no statistics anymore." -- Professor Martin Wegkamp

"So we're sitting here ... wondering whether we're all going to explode." -- Professor Pollard

"This is a new mathematical symbol ... 'it might be proportional to'." -- ibid.

"It's like tossing a million ... a trillion coins and having them all come down tails. It might happen. And you might die." -- ibid.

"Of COURSE I have a touch-tone phone! Your mom!" -- Me, to the United States Postal Service tracking computer

"I hate waking up and trying to figure out whether it's AM or PM." -- Me

"What would she say? 'Excuse me, officer, the nuclear holocaust knocked down all the speed limit signs. You know how these solar powered cars are; they just drive so fast.'" -- from "The Aftermath"

"Without wasting any time, the throats of the other two men were also slit. This insured that they were both permanently out of commission." -- ibid.

"Impression of Kurt Kobain: Yah-dah-nai-ull, ah-duh-ny-ll, [sound of head being blown off by a shotgun]." -- Sean

Sean: "When are you waking up?"
Me: "I'm not."
Sean: "Cool!"

"This is proof by intimidation." -- Professor Pollard

"And so the expected value of the round trip would get a bit infinite." -- ibid.

"What would her grandmother say? Her grandmother being a probabilist, [that is] ..." -- ibid.

"'But you have to come back here, because this is a recurrent household!'" -- ibid.

"I'm trying to say, 'This is all you have to worry about; let's not worry about it.'" -- ibid.

"I should show you my proof of the Marriage Lemma some time. It starts off with princes and frogs and such. It's amazing how much mathematics you can do with fairy tales." -- ibid.

"I like to draw them from top down. I think in the book it was drawn from left to right. It was my co-author who drew that picture." -- Professor Lovasz

"But what I'd like to figure out -- if I could find a pen that writes ..." -- ibid.

Me: "I haven't looked at a single kanzi yet (for tomorrow's test), but I have cut out notecards."
Durbin-san, facetiously: "Well, you're halfway there."

Durbin-san, quizzing Eshkol-san: "Yorokobu."
Me, witnessing Eshkol-san's look of exasperation: "Oh! You're screwed!"
Eshkol-san, hands raised in triumph, supremely confident, remembering the kanzi and calmly beginning to write it down: "No! I'm so not!!! Observe my powers."

Me: "Dude, you have shit!"
Sean, apparently trying to contradict me: "I have crap!"

"Nuclear missile ready." -- elegant female C&C voice from Starcraft

"Okay, Mr. Artist-formerly-known-as-a-lapsed-Catholic." -- Sarah Beck

Me: "We usually refer to Hillel people as infidels here in the Kosher Kitchen."
Sarah: "No, I'm referring to card-carrying infidels."

Gunslinger, standing over a dead body, gun still smoking: "OK, stranger ... What's the circumference of the Earth? ... Who wrote 'The Odyssey' and 'The Iliad'? ... What's the average rainfall of the Amazon Basin?"
Old Westerner: "Bart, you fool! You can't shoot first and ask questions later!"
-- from "The Far Side"

"I'm in the mood for celebrating the slaughter of Persians." -- Michael Rubin

"P.S. I was hit by a car today, and I am proud to announce that the car came out of it worse than I did. Details on Sunday." -- Sean, in an email

"I wouldn't be singing if it weren't for Kenny [Rogers]." -- Ishai Eshkol

"Got any questions about propane ... or propane accessories?" -- Firebat

"You just ranched your water!" -- Me, to Anne, referring to ranch dressing

"You're a trip, Dan. You're like going to Cancun." -- Anne

"I think you've already given me a lot of these overhead racist things." -- ibid.

Puff Daddy featuring Jimmy Page - Come With Me
Puff Daddy dreams he's making out on a canopy bed with a hottie, which is his second-favorite dream, after the one where he writes a song.
-- from a critique of MTV's 1998 Top 100 Songs

[grossman] If you ever do want to talk, I'm always online
[anon] I've noticed

Me: "So, the Yale Glee Club and the symphony are performing Beethoven's 9th this Saturday, if you wanted to come. It should be good."
Professor Wegkamp: "Ah, I sang that last year in the New Haven Chorale."
Me: "Really? What voice part are you?"
Professor Wegkamp: "I'm a tenor."
Me: "Oh, I'm a bass two."
Professor Wegkamp, in all seriousness: "Oh ... I'm sorry."

"But there it is ... in dark blackish color and creamy yellow." -- Professor Pollard

"Hello, Dan and Sean. Sean, this is your mom. I'm just calling to see if you two are alive and, uh, you know, breathing and everything else. Uh, you don't need to call us, uh, back, and ... 'cause I assume if two of you were dead I would have heard about it; and as long as one of you's alive then I know that the other one is being taken care of. Now if you've had a big falling out, then it could be a problem. But, uh, just wanted to make sure you got home all right and everything. I love you; 'bye." -- message on the answering machine

"How do you know it will stop within, say, the lifetime of the universe? You don't, but here we're not making any assumptions about the lifetime of the universe." -- Professor Lovasz

"This says that there is no machine that, given a theorem, can spit out a proof of it. This is good for people like me because our job is proving theorems, and this means we're in business. No big machine's ever going to come along and replace us." -- ibid.

    Former commanders on shipboard and ordinary sailor-types noted that there are two "Really Worrisome Orders": the first is "emergency speed", which means "kill warning bells, disable safety systems, give her everything she's got, and let me know just before the engines burn out".
    The other is ... "ramming speed", which means "kill warning bells, disable safety systems, full emergency speed, today is a good day to die".

"It's been a long day." -- Ishai, at noon

"So, the idea is that the master says, 'Go over there,' and the chain says, 'No! No! I don't want to go uphill!' and the master says, 'Well, do it with small probability, just to keep me happy.'" -- Professor Pollard

"Depending on who you talk to, they either think it's God's gift to mankind or it's the work of the Devil." -- ibid.

"Well, that would be quite a letdown if you spent your entire career working on Markov chains and then some bastard came along and proved they didn't exist." -- ibid.

"In case you don't know, we read the [Ten Commandments] this Shabbat, in [the Torah portion] Yitro. They're pretty important. Just thought everyone should know." -- Andrew, reminding people of services

"(AP) A statement issued by Hussein's private physician said the 63-year-old monarch's condition `has become critical due to the failure of the function of internal organs.'" -- yes, that would probably cause bad things to happen

"Beauty lies in the hands of the beerholder." -- from Manish's .sig

Confluently yours,
Anne-aphlactic shock -- a signature of Anne's

"I think it would have been funny if you and that bass player dude had gotten into a fistfight." -- Anne, commenting on the fact that the leftmost bassist in the YSO had no choice but to repeatedly poke me in the arm, thigh, calf, and torso with his bow throughout Beethoven's 9th

"It's too bad you're not Hanif." -- Sean

"I need a better bra for this bus." -- Anne Thompson

"Just because your father uses a light saber to shave doesn't mean he's a Jedi." -- Me, to Sean

"People around you are crawling on the ground with no eyes, and you're like [looking down], 'Oh, sorry, man,' plbbbbhhhhhhhhhhhttt [imitating the blowing of one's nose]." -- Sean, referring to my God-given response to chemical and biological warfare and disease in general, which is to get a sore throat for three days, a stuffy nose for three weeks, and then recover

"Unless of course you had some more exotic creeping fungal illness thing going on. 'Look at you with that fungal thing going on!'" -- Anne (whoa)

"No, no, yeah, yeah, sure." -- Professor Wegkamp

"So you get c minus c -- that's 0, I believe." -- ibid., sarcastically

"This is the hardest part [of the proof] if you do it correctly. But I'm not going to do it correctly, so don't worry." -- ibid.

"Whoa. This is a pretty inscrutable thing. ... So inscrutable that it's wrong." -- Professor Pollard, staring at the board

"Ah, hell. Well, you know this is a calculation that in theory we can all do." -- ibid., giving up

"But this is a pretty complex property. If you can't even decide whether it's empty, you don't really expect to be able to tell whether it's recursively enumerable." -- Professor Lovasz

"Now the question is, 'Can you tile your bathroom?'" -- ibid.

"Dan: He'll have a small pizza with mushrooms and green peppers. With no parmesan on top. And a small Coke. Here's to hoping they always bring the penis." -- Anne Meyer's message to me in the Herald Valentine issue

Me: "To what do I owe the honor of that message?"
Lizzie: "The honor of coming online while I'm in mad active icq mode."

"Apparently, my name is the overwhelming choice of my Faculty for my replacement." -- my dad, in reference to his resignation as Chairman of the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago

"It's blood time." -- anonymous Yale faculty member, in reference to the same issue

Me, sheepishly, shying away from the potentially incriminating topic of conversation, by the fridge: "I'm just over here."
Sean, laughing condescendingly: "I can tell!"

"Now, let's see ... the big hand is on the little's throat, next to the twelve." -- Professor Pollard, bitterly reading his watch

"We will perform minor miracles with Martingales." -- ibid.

Sean: "Remember our conversation from last night?"
Me: "Yeah?"
Sean: "'Nough said."
Me, hesistantly: "Uh ... which conversation?"

Larry, as Sean's antics cause the entire bass section to laugh during Glee Club rehearsal: "You rock my world, Sean!"
Me: "Yeah, he's almost as good as that plastic thing!"
Steve Song, catching my unfortunate choice of words: "... Ooooh."

Me, to Dave Altman (BR '97), who was here for the weekend, and his guest, Monday morning, in front of Sterling: "You're still here!"
Dave, playing tour guide: "Had to hit the Women's Table!"

"SMITE THE UNGODLY" -- Sarah, in an email, referring to Hillel

"... cause they have early Hominids coming out their ears." -- Sean

[One of the funnier moments in .project history just happened here in 1458/1459, but since it involved no audible pronunciations, it cannot really be written here. So, pretend that you have just witnessed something absolutely hilarious, laugh uncontrollably, spew Spanish, and fall out of your chair.]

"Please me collect at ..." -- typo in an email from a professor at a graduate school I'm considering

"I'm tacitly assuming that if you're sticking your head in the room, you're going to do it before you die." -- Professor Pollard

"I don't have the Constitution on me right now." -- Evan Farber

"I am writing to you by email with two purposes: (1) to give you advance notice that you will be receiving a letter of admission from a program to which you did not formally apply, and (2) ..." -- acceptance email from Cornell's Operations Research PhD program, to which I, indeed, did not actually apply

"I guess that means they got my application." -- Me, reading the above, in reference to the Cornell Computer Science department, which had not confirmed their receipt of my application

"Cliches are a dime a dozen -- avoid them like the plague." -- Manish's .sig

"Pow Wippo!" -- meaningless phrase of the day on Acrophobia