King of Etruria

29 October 2005

I am thoroughly addicted now to Loco Pops, the gourmet Mexican icepop store in Durham (at the intersection of Hillsborough and 15th Streets, just off 9th Street) partly because I like frozen treats and partly because they sell pops for $1 and $2, which beats the prices at Ben & Jerry's any day. My favorite flavor so far has been creamy lime, which tastes like key lime pie on a stick. (Now if they cover it in chocolate and batter and deep-fry it, they could sell it at the State Fair!) The chili flavors are interesting (pineapple chili, mango chili, chocolate chili), pumpkin tasted like pumpkin pie, the melon tarragon was good, as was creamy ginger pear. Of course, when I was in there yesterday, I picked up a traditional Mexican flavor: sweet corn. It tasted like... frozen creamed corn. Which was really not pleasant. So I gave it to the cats, who lapped up the creamy part, leaving a kind of rough corny center.

 

Posted at 1756.

28 October 2005

This year's pumpkin:
I swear the Grim Reaper looks far more sinister when lit from inside with candles. I just liked his skeletal hand, which was hella hard to carve. It took way longer than last year's pumpkin.

 

Posted at 2343.

24 October 2005

Things just keep getting weirder. I was poking around the internet today for my website (because I got a rather strange e-mail from someone about a line drawing of a skeleton that's posted on the webpage for one of the courses that I taught) and I discovered that my grandfather has written two short fiction books. I had no clue whatsoever. They're cleverly written under a pseudonym, Tik-Tok, but one German book page gave his real name. Now, the question is... do I buy the books from Amazon? I know my grandfather wrote a memoir of his time as a POW decades ago (which I was not allowed to read), but this... this is just weird. Next thing you know, I'll find a sci-fi choose-your-own-adventure on Amazon by Piki. (Fortunately, the only hits Piki gives me on Amazon are for Maori books.)

 

Posted at 1326.

23 October 2005

Grrrr, stupid Perkins. They closed the main entrance, so now you can't get to the library with just a few steps from the Chapel or the bus stop. You have to walk all the way around to the new construction, go into the new library (Bostock), walk up a flight of stairs, then backtrack into the Perkins stacks. Get your books, walk back into Bostock, down the stairs, and all the way to the back corner of the first floor to circulation. Pain. In. The. Ass. Anyway, I presented my books to the guy at the desk and my UNC card, and...

"Are you a classics grad student at UNC?"
What do you think tipped him off? Moses Finley's Economy and Society or Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean?
"Uh, sure."
"I took a class with someone from UNC classics. His name was Charlie."
"Uhm, there's no grad student named Charlie in classics at UNC."
"OK, give me a minute. He had light hair... was soft-spoken."
"Hmmm. Dan?"
"No."
"Uh, Derek?"
"No."
"Patrick?"
"Noooo. I'll think of it."
"Sean?"
"It was Diskin Clay's course on the pre-Socratics."
"I have no clue, sorry. I don't know who would have taken that class. By the way... when is Perkins circulation opening back up? This is a pain in the ass."
"It'll take a year."
"There really isn't an appropriate Latin phrase for this, so I'll leave you with, `Booyah!'"
OK, so that was just a quote from last night's SNL. But I couldn't make a whole entry around it 'cause it wasn't that funny.

I'll bet that guy is still trying to figure out who Charlie is.

 

Posted at 1150.

There is a woodpecker pecking the metal part of my chimney. Not the wood part. It sounds like a jackhammer in here and it's freaking out the cats. But I guess I can rest assured that he'll break his little beak and natural selection will take care of the rest. Although this cartoon gives me pause...

 

Posted at 0953.

22 October 2005

There used to be this website called the "Annoying J. Crew Model of the Week," which was great fun when I used to work for them. The guy who ran the website claimed he inexplicably received a J. Crew catalogue at least once per week, and he scanned and posted the ugliest/skinniest/worst dressed model. Well, I'm now getting the catalogue Newport News in the mail, which is considerably worse and more inexplicable than J. Crew. I was flipping through it on the way to the Fair the other day and realized just how incredibly ugly this one model was. I suppose she looks normal enough here, but if you zoom in on her head, you realize that her eyes are way too close together and one eye is significantly smaller than the other (it's not just lighting or makeup either, 'cause you can tell in all her other pictures too). Now, I'm not saying that all women should attempt to live up to the unrealistic expectations that models present to us, but isn't the point of a model to be prettier than I am? Just like the point of a president is to be smarter than I am and someone to look up to? Anyway, I suppose that recoiling in horror at her lopsided mug makes me a bad feminist.

 

Posted at 0957.

21 October 2005

Top 10 NC State Fair Meats

1. Pork - from hot dogs to souse!
2. Beef - Burgers. Moooo.
3. Turkey - giant legs of it
4. Chicken - in a pita!
5. Lamb - It's better when you say "yee-rohs!"
6. Emu - Seriously
7. Ostrich - Ick
8. Catfish - deep-fried, of course
9. Shrimp - Buffalo style
10. Alligator - on a stick, of course

You can actually buy each of these 10 types of meat at the State Fair. Granted, only one stand was selling alligator, and one was selling ostrich (incidentally, with a giant blow-up ostrich head on the stand, which would really not make me want to eat it). Out of the ten, the people in my party only tried three: pork (Andy actually ate a free sample of souse), beef (Patrick's deep-fried cheeseburger), and turkey (Andy got a giant turkey leg). Laura and I stuck with corn and sweet stuff (funnel cake for her, cotton candy and caramel apple for me). Patrick says that his goal next year is to try all ten types of meat.

 

Posted at 1036.

20 October 2005

The 2005 NC State Fair in Phone-mail Pictures

Deep-fried Cheeseburger	Giant Turkey Leg
Deep-fried Snickers	Pig Racing

 

Posted at 2235.

19 October 2005

Howdy, kids! Today's topic is, "Fun with Other Languages!" I was reading an article in Italian on the role of millet in the ancient Mediterranean diet, and the author says, "Il Panicum italicum fu accompagnato da una considerazione sociale che lo indicativa come alimento spregevole..." I didn't know the word spregevole, so I looked it up. The online Italian-English dictionary says:

Principal Translation: spregevole (adj) paltry, miserable
Other Forms: individuo spregevole (n) cocksucker

Interesting. I've been attempting to work on my Italian by watching a lot of subtitled Italian movies, but honestly I think I've only picked up curse words and regional dialect terms (since lots of Italian movies are set in the South or in Sicily). But apparently I can pick up crude terms even by reading scholarly writing.

 

Posted at 1953.

17 October 2005

So the CT scan came back negative for a sinus infection. Which means, I guess, that I just spent $150 in co-pay to discover I'm completely imagining my sinus pain. Well, either that, or it's actually a chronic stress migraine, which is entirely possible. At any rate, the CT findings were: "Paranasal sinuses are well aerated. Nasal septal deviation and spurring on the right. Slight deformity right inferior nasal turbinate." Yay me! I have a deformity! The second hit for "nasal turbinate" on Google makes the connection between an enlarged one and headaches. The eighth hit is about Piltdown Man, which is weird. Anyway, seems like I am a miserable ball of stress and allergies, both of which will hopefully be lessened in the next couple weeks. You'd think after all this trouble that I would have gotten to see the CT scan and not just gotten a print-out of the results.

 

Posted at 1953.

16 October 2005

My mom and her boyfriend Rick came down Saturday evening to hang out with me (read: make me a home-cooked meal and help clean my house) and bring me my mom's old carpet, which goes with my couch. Later in the evening, while Rick was watching the UVa-FSU game, my mom suggested I could use another "hand" while making the bed. So here's me clowning around with Rick's (or, as my mom calls him, Lefty's) prosthetic arm. (It's the one with the watch attached.)

 

Posted at 1113.

14 October 2005

After waiting for an hour because the tech was running late, I got a CT scan of my sinuses. This is what the machine looks like: a giant doughnut that would make Homer Simpson salivate. It made my head feel very warm, which made my sinuses a tad uncomfortable, and for some reason it generated a bunch of static that clung to my hair. It's kind of hard to remain perfectly still when you're lying on your stomach with your chin resting on the table, trying to keep your eyes closed. But hopefully this'll help figure out what's going on with my sinuses.

 

Posted at 1201.

13 October 2005

Tomorrow, I get to go for a CT scan of my head! It's a little freaky, but also quite cool at the same time, especially if I get to see what my sinuses, facial bones, and brain look like. So this is a picture of healthy sinuses, all nice and butterfly-looking. The guess is that my sinuses look more like a butterfly that's been whacked by a little kid attempting to catch it and put it in a jar. Isn't it great when every single thing in your family's medical history shows up in you eventually? Actually, I can't complain. The migraine gene thankfully passed me by.

 

Posted at 2049.

7 October 2005

The other day, I captured the before-and-after of the cleaning of James B. Duke in this series of phone pictures.

   

I call the third picture, "Christo B. Duke." His unveiling ceremony was later in the day, hence the giant blue sheet for the big reveal. At any rate, he was apparently taken down in May or June and sent for cleaning, but I didn't even notice he was gone from in front of the chapel until I saw him being raised by a crane.

 

Posted at 1159.

6 October 2005

I feel like a coke fiend now. There's no end to the stuff I'm putting up my nose. But I suspect that coke smells better than Afrin or Flonase, which are like snorting Vicks Vap-o-Rub. Allergies: just another reason to hate my ginormous nostrils.

 

Posted at 1914.

Did you hear about the Italian guy who found a Roman villa using Google Earth? It gives all new meaning to the phrase "armchair archaeologist." I guess we need to start a new field... googlarchaeology.

 

Posted at 1140.

2 October 2005

Ch-ch-ch-chia! Ch-ch-ch-chia... lawn! At least Patrick's grass seed is growing. So I suppose I'm not getting eaten alive by mosquitoes watering the lawn every morning and night for nothing.

 

Posted at 1047.

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Since I'm a good little Boy Scout and always want to be prepared for every possible event, at my last gyno visit I had asked her if student health had pre-conception counseling, what vitamins were good to take, that kind of thing on the off, off chance that within the next year I decided that I had plenty of time on my hands and might possibly perhaps maybe think about having a kid. She got all excited and prescribed me prenatal vitamins explaining, "It's never too early to start!" I was sorry I even asked. So I told my mom this last night and she said, "Ugh, those prenatal vitamins are awful. Giant horse pills. I ended up giving them all to your dad. He loved them." That explains what's wrong with me.

 

Posted at 1054.