And the one-sided conversation begins anew.

A long silent week, as though things weren't happening. Oh, they are. They are.

On the job front - things look good for next year. In all likelihood 5 classes if not 6, plus benefits and advising kids and all kinds of cool stuff. Good deal. Students were relatively great this week, the ones I tutor and my class and everything. I mean, they did their share of griping about tests, didn't show up, got 60s on quizzes, etc., but they were altogether amiable. Plus I had a great conversation about Brave New World one day during a calculus session, so you know we're set.

Margie (that's iPod Mary Magdeline, for those of you not in the know) (aka Ma Searl) has been in town this week for an art conference down in Boston. We had a great dinner at the aptly named "Westborough Korean Restaurant" on Wednesday, and I mean great, best Korean food I've had in my life type great. People should be warned though, that they apparently lace their soy sauce with crack or something equally addictive; Beck hit that stuff and asked for refills like Old Faithful, only at smaller intervals and with fewer fat Midwesterners around. Behold; it was a sight. So much of an addict was Beck, btw, that she returned to the Westborough Korean Restaurant twice this past weekend. INSANITY! We went Saturday night with Ben and she went Sunday night with iPMM while I stayed at home, graded papers and ate pizza. Oh, and watched a great Simpsons episode (on Principal Skinner's opinion on wymen's inherent inferiority in math and the resultant scheme by Lisa Simpson), followed by a just god-awful, violently terrible episode of Family Guy. I just posted my Searl-Board monologue on why I think it's somewhat unfair to compare the Simpsons to the Family Guy, but last night's FG episode just hit on everything I dislike about it, and something South Park ripped on not too long ago: the fact that a lot of FG's "humorous" non-sequiturs amount to pointless pop-culture references. Actually, not really much references so much as referential insert capsules that add nothing to the show and worse, fail to make me laugh - I'm thinking specifically of the "that time Moby Dick stayed with us" scene from last night. Ugh, guys, ugh, and the gay marriage plot - Seth MacFarlane, the voice of 18 months ago.

Ultimate yesterday was a mixed bag: an easily won but thoroughly stupid BUDA game (including, among other things, my being called "superhuman" in a derogatory fashion, Dave being accused of not drinking his coffee, a guy claiming to have heard a sound from 60 yards away *before* he saw something from said 50 yards away, another dude catching a disc a solid 4 yards out of the endzone, stumbling forward, and then claiming to have landed in the endzone 7 seconds later) (there were others, you can call me and ask about it if you'd like) followed by a very hard but invigorating first practice of the Polaroid season. New pickups include Ben, Jason and Ethan on the men's side, all of whom look solid + and give us a sweet variety of go-to guys. Pumped we are. So good times ahead, hopefully we'll have a fun season.

Beck's rotations continue to go well; she has one more week in large animal surgery and then it's off to Rochacha for an externship. Did I mention Greg and Meghan took us all out top dinner at Blue Ginger on Friday? Also awesome, and we ate with Fred and Nunny, friends of the Searls from their Cooperstown days, and Meghan and Margie made a boatload of gastroenterologist jokes, none of which (I am sure) Fred had ever heard before. Numerous other jokes were made about "Beck's wedding," where I apparently am in the loop enough to be granted the DJing job. Huzzah! And when Nunnny asked us how we were going to handle religion in the ceremony, I said I thought we would pass out the opiate of the masses and just let everyone smoke it. Then Nunny bumped into Ming Tsai, quite literally. We also learned that Ming Tsai's wife is named Pauli, which answers all kinds of questions regarding her college major. All in all, a solid night.

What else? I watched, or rather started to watch, "What the Bleep Do We Know?" And you may be asking yourself why I'm not reviewing it, and I respond - because I did not watch it. WTBDWK has the dubious distinction of being one of two movies IN MY REMEMBERED LIFE that I have sat down intending to watch in entirety and not bothered finishing. The other was The Thin Red Line, another mind-numbingly dumb movie that, as an added bonus, was 3+ hours long. As a side note, that's pretty good - I mean, I even once sat through Now and Then, a film that I am fairly confident will forever reign supreme as my least favorite movie ever. Getting back to it - WTBDWK was quantum physics as explained to the brain-dead, followed by people giving their opinions without giving their credentials. Not that I could throw down and rap metaphysically and follow that up with my credentials (I mean, what the hell, Nyet Jones, M.?), but seriously, if you're going to wax rather unpoetically about physical reality ("I mean, man, what I used to think was real isn't, and what I think wasn't real is, man!"), then you should at least give us your name. Instead, the film showed us a bunch of the quasi-qualified, complete with beards, books behind them, wild hair and Indian accents. Basically, the whole thing was a tragically failed attempt to blow my mind, and amounted to nothing much more than a bunch of "woahs" and "it's really your mind that forms your reality" type commentary. Oh, and follow that up with some hideously moronic plot about an artist photographer and her anxiety pills, her meeting with a quantum cute black kid on a basketball court, numerous Tron-esque effects and miscellaneous equations, and, the kicker, a completely bullshit story about the Caribbean inhabitants and their "inability to see Columbus's ships because they had never seen one before" - ridiculous. I had heard that this film was some kind of cultish propaganda film, so I was entirely shocked by the lunacy contained within, but geez... not so much that they were wrong or manipulative, but just the sheer pathetic film-making that went into this. Sadness. As to the ridiculousness of the claims, I found another blogger who hits it pretty much on the head, so here is WTBDWK getting its deserved ripping.

Wigwee's nose is looking better every day, btw. Long blog, so I'll leave with you an A+ conversation I had with a student:

S: This number is really ugly.
NJ: Well, without ugly numbers, there would be no pretty numbers.
S: What?
NJ: It's like if everything were blue, we would have no word for "blue."
S: Wow, you're getting all philosophical today.
NJ: I'm always philosophical.
S: Always?
NJ: Well, at least when I'm talking.
S: (Rolls eyes). Well, that's pretty obvious.
NJ: Of course.
S: Of course what?
NJ: Of course it's obvious. As a teacher, that's my job.
S: What's your job?
NJ: To point out obvious things to the ill-informed.
S: Ha. Thanks a lot.
NJ: That was a joke.
S: I know.
NJ: I was just pointing out the obvious.
S: No, I know.
NJ: And now I'm pointing out that i was pointing out the obvious.
S: Yeah, and ...
NJ: And now I'm pointing out that I was pointing out that I was pointing out the obvious.
S: I get it! I get it!
NJ: I can keep this up all day.
S: But I got it the first time!
NJ: Only because I'm such a SWEET teacher.
S: (Smiles, chuckles).
NJ: That was a joke.