The Last Candle

The Central Michigan index page makes with the Halloween spirit. I think it looks terrible: nasty brown sky, generic pumpkin leering from an awkward position. Give ‘em credit for having a bit of fun, but this is the portal for an entire fargin’ university we’re talking about there. They probably get a couple thousand hits per day, and the background to the largest graphic on the page reminds me a camp latrine. Yuck.

This year marks a new low in personal Halloween participation, having not even thought vaguely about what I would dress up as if given the chance. Well, that’s not quite true: I think a Pyramid Head costume would be nice and scary — especially roaming around the neighborhoods out in the country after dark — but I don’t think I could make one that did the ole’ Head justice. I wouldn’t have the time to put it all together, even if I managed to procure the design plans for a big fleshy pyramidal snout and materials, including a butcher-type robe and 5-foot long knife. Then again, if there are any butchering factories around here, I might have only needed to make a single stop for the costume parts.

Hmm: my hopeful plans for the weekend are to rent a copy of Silent Hill 4 and get my spooky horror-filled thrills that way. The Silent Hill series has apparently — but unsuprisingly — become my stand-by and favorite for terror entertainment.

Want to know a beautiful thing? How about your differential equations professor forgetting to administer a quiz, giving you the whole weekend to study for the next attempt on Tuesday? Beautiful, I say. Maybe fantabulous. Shiny stars and pretty puppies and bright flowers in dark soil.

What’s less beautiful — rusted tin-can ugly, perhaps — is the professor announcing that the next test was a week from today. Hey, man: we just had a test. So there’s a quiz next Tuesday, and the exam is on Thursday. Just like the previous nine weeks, I’m going to be swimming in ^dy/_dx heavily for another week. And I thought I had a break comin’ on.

But tonight is Thursday night Mass, where we head off Old Mission Deli & Beverage (Mass? Old Mission! Get it?) and get beer and big bags of heavily salted peanuts. It’s one of the best things in the world. So unless the store explodes in a big ethanol fire, the night is going to be double a-okay no matter what happens next week.

Conglomerate!!

rnd: Had kind of a busy weekend — and not just solely because of schoolwork for once. Friday night was a mini-LAN party in Grand Rapids with Ben and some of his pals. It was pure Unreal Tournament for about six hours straight, which is plenty enough to burn me out solid. There was also only five people total, due to the impromptu nature of the party, so the variation in skill wasn’t so diverse either — which means I got smoked pretty often. But I still had fun, and Ben says there’ll be many more parties in the future with more people.

I drove back to Mount Pleasant from Grand Rapids (where the LAN’ was held), arriving home at about 5 AM. “Wind-down time,” which means goof off for a while, lead to a 6:30 AM sleepytime, consequently causing me to get up at 3 PM on Saturday. I had a TON of work to get crackin’ on Saturday. Suffice to say that a lot of it was relegated to Sunday’s workload.

But on Sunday, Amber, Anthony, Jill, and Sarah came to visit! Well, Amber and Jill came to visit Sarah, one of their previous roommates, and Anthony came with to join in the fun. They all eventually rumbled up o-vah here, and we all went to Applebee’s and had a…semi-grand time. I dunno about those chain restaurants: no good beer, expensive but sub-par food. (If I went by myself, I would go to Mountain Town Station every time for the excellent microbrews and delicious but inexpensive entrees. And say nothing about be surrounded by all sorts of pictures and antiques and baubles and garage sale items strung up all over the place. But I didn’t go by myself: the greatness of company eclipses any ole’ restaurant shortcomings. Unless the food was poisoned and the waiter was sociopathic.)

politics: I’m behind in writing a fisking of Chad Livengood’s most recent whining in CM Life, but it should pop up within a couple of days. Or you could just visit the link and behold the absolutely inane logic and absurd bias yourself, which contains such gems as the Bush camp calling Kerry a “liberal” as evidence that they’re getting desperate. Welcome to Chad World, where Bush and Republicans are impotent morons who can only commit acts of pure idiocy, while Kerry and the Democrats are infalliable intellects with hearts of gilded silver.

music: Still listening to Nightwish’s Once, and I’m slowly edging towards the conclusion that this is one of the best metal albums I’ve heard yet. Very near Epica-status. I hope to do a track-by-track review soon, just so I can output the many details from Once that I’m enjoying so completely.

and finally, more rnd: Poor Ashlee Simpson!

Courtesy of Cooking for Engineers, everything about flour you would ever want to know. Or most of it, at least.

The Cooking for Engineers dude not only has some fine recipes and articles, but his instruction graphs are…amazing. There’s an example at the bottom of this recent recipe.

I didn’t hear any raid sirens go off when I was on campus Monday, but they sure would have been fair warning: ninjas have infiltrated Central Michigan campus.

As I’ve heard from the grapevine, the story behind that picture — the only snap that made it out of the fray that didn’t include excessive and wanton violence — was that the ninja, found napping as seen in the photograph, exploded into a flying, flipping rage at the sound of the camera shutter clicking. The body count of the “incident” — a bevy of serial killings within about 15 minutes — included the photographer, scores of pedestrians, a tour group of prospective students and their parents, a dozen cars, a “cleaning out” of the bookstore and then a most brutal storming of the library. To say the least, hundreds of janitorial and burial staff worked through the night to make the place usable for morning.

Not that CM Life is doing much to warn us: I expected the front page headline to blare out “NINJAS HERE; MAKE PEACE WITH GOD” with the byline “Student body reduced by 76% in single day,” but there was some completely innocuous article about the election or something. Priorities, people! I smell coverup. But you didn’t hear that from me…