Bandolero by Day

"I KNOW ALL SCIENCE, ALL THE TIME!" - mko, in imitation of me. I told her that I need this on a bumper sticker.

"I'm sciencing as fast as I can!" - Professor Farnsworth. I finally saw "Bender's Big Score". The extended opening theme is tremendously great, as is Kwanzaa Bot's rap (COOLIO).


On an almost related note, I feel weird for wanting to buy the special edition "Twister" DVD coming out tomorrow (though clearly I won't - look at how long it took me to buy the Futurama movie). Judge me if you must, but the film delighted me in my meteorology-obsessed youth (and Action Scientist obsessed youth). Also, it is stupidly fun. IN ADDITION, I enjoy the soundtrack, and it's one of those crazy movies with the soundtrack actually appearing in the film. Unconventional and mad, it is.


OH HEY, it is Cinco de Mayo! This, for me, is mostly a holiday where I eat more Mexican food than usual, and considering my usual intake, this is quite a lot of Mexican food.

Most of my cultural awareness relates directly to food.

Somewhat related to this: sometimes at the museum, we get tourists from Mexico. This is the only time I get to practice my Spanish, because despite the endless bitching I've noticed about non-English speakers in the U.S., I can count on one hand (that lost a couple of fingers in a shop class accident) the number of times I've run into someone who could not speak English and was not with a friend/family member who could translate for them.

Today, instead of telling someone to buckle their seat belt (abrocharse), I told them to go to bed with their seat belt (acostarse).

It was pretty freaking awesome once I'd realized what I'd done. Good five minutes of laughing, that. Well, I was laughing. The people I was talking to just awkwardly boarded the ride.

So, re: subject, I was looking at the MIT graduate admissions website.

I DID NOT EVEN KNOW THAT WAS A THING.

Just reading it makes me feel tingly all over.

I need some kind of "science bros and hos" icon.

I thought I'd share what I have up as my desktop wallpaper right now, because I can't stop looking at the lights of Planet Earth as seen from space (thank you, NASA). That's what "6 billion people" looks like from space. For extra-nerdy fun, locate the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Nile River. HINT: it is not that hard.

I will never be able to delete my bookmark for this article. I just can't do it. Nothing puts a smile on my face like the thought of injecting people with life-saving radioactive scorpion venom. I mean, honestly. LIFE-SAVING RADIOACTIVE SCORPION VENOM. I love you, science.

A comic that made me smile, and will make other math geeks smile: Because that is exactly what I said when I learned of that bizarro equation (though it might have been "Are you fucking with me?"). EVEN BETTER IN THIS FORM: e^πi+1=0 "Finally, an equation that contains the five most important prime numbers!" Me: "YEAH! ...WHY DO WE NEED ONE?"

I forgot to mention that Meghan and I debated whether or not a zombie infant would be able to function as a zombie while we waited for the movie to start.

I pointed out that newborns can't even roll over on their own, and so would never be able to move about and seek out the flesh that sustains them. The only way an infant zombie could survive was if the mother (or father) zombie maintained some sort of subdued parenting instinct, enough that they'd bring flesh to the infant.

Meghan pointed out that I ruin everything with my stupid science.

My stupid ZOMBIE SCIENCE!

So a gay middle-aged photographer and his sidekick No Name the Amazon makeup woman walk into a Starbucks...

Punchline: I'm going in for one of those "glamour" photo sessions tomorrow. I don't much like the idea of glamour photos, but my mother and grandmother have been after me to have my pictures taken, and I'm getting it done for FREE. That's a very important word. The catch: I only get a few photos of average size in a portfolio, with a promise of a full set if I can get two other people to set up session appointments. Even if I don't succeed in doing that, though, my mother and grandmother will be so thrilled to see me in makeup that only a few small photos will sate them and fill them with glee. It solves MY problem.

The Amazon tells me I have great unrealized potential, but I must 1) wonder how many girls she has used that line on, and 2) worry that she might be speaking of turning my potential energy into kinetic energy by pushing me down some stairs.

I will stay away from flights of stairs tomorrow.