The thing that's bad about having a blog

and too much time is that you start thinking you can just blog about anything, and someone will care.

Here are my recent revelations:
1) The Decembrists make depressing music that I no longer want to listen to. I don't really like the voice of their lead, AND I just discovered that what sounded like the most upbeat song on their recent album, The Crane Wife, is actually about a guy whose girlfriend gets shot dead by her brother, who was actually aiming for him. Well whatever, I didn't buy Patrick that CD. I still love Belle and Sebastian, though, so that's a plus.

2) It is very hard to choose a caterer online. On business days, I've been spending the morning at the archives with Patrick; I take pictures of documents he arbitrarily chooses. In the afternoons, I research and contact the caterers on the B Room's list. There's no shortage of people to go to these various caterers' tastings (and thank you to George, Maria, and my mom for helping us out with the first ones), but I don't know how we're going to compare different people's assessments of different caterers. We need a rubric. A system with international standard units of tastiness, which would be stored in some country like France, but not France because they already have the international prototypes of kilograms and amperes and things like that, besides which they probably couldn't be counted on to be neutral in the area of tastiness determination. They'd probably go around make everything too stinky, like Camembert.

3) The kilogram is actually a rare sort of unit, by Système Internationale standards. Most units have some objective[ly silly] way of being measured; a meter, for example, is "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second." But a ki is simply "equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram." Ha! I think Mr. Wildermuth told us in 10th grade that there's a cylinder locked up in a room somewhere (in France, I guess) that is an exact kilogram. It defines kilogram.

4) I have been watching a lot of bootlegged DVDs. The best part is the beginning, when they tell you that movie piracy is a serious crime. You want to tell them, Hey, this is a bootleg DVD! But you can't. Anyway I didn't buy any, we just watch the ones the hostel has. Also we watch a lot of internet tv (youtube.com). I can't get these Flight of the Conchords songs out of my head! They're self-described as "New Zealand's fourth most popular folk parody duo." Click on the PLAY button to hear/see a catchy song from their TV show.


This is totally legal--HBO wants me to put it on my blog, that's why they gave me the code! But the version on youtube is funnier.