Delicious.

Most people, if not all, have experienced earworms in their lives. It's when a song gets stuck in your head, and you can't get it out of there, dang it!

On Tuesday, I had a rather bizarre earworm - might call it a mouthworm, as nasty as that sounds. See, I love the chili at Steak n Shake. And at one point in the morning, I unfortunately thought about it - and it was stuck in my mind all day. I could taste the chili in my mouth all day long, until I finally got a chance to eat some that night - it was truly an agonizing experience!

I remember eating some chicken noodle soup for lunch - it was kind of interesting. The chili taste was still in my mind, and -- well, you know the feeling when you are expecting the drink to be Sprite, but it ends up only being water? It was kind of like that. Shocking at the same moment it was kind of nasty. But the soup was pretty good.

Mouthworms? Bleagh. That sounds disgusting...

Ancient Cabal

Yeah, it's a corny pun. Ancient Cabal, Old Faction, Olefaction...you know the drill.

For the rest of the day, I couldn't think of what to do with the assignment. But then, I went to Penn Station- and what assaulted my sense?

Wow, it was delicious. Freshly fried french fries, tomato sauce, grilled chicken... The bouquet tickled my nostrils...I finally ate, and it tasted great (but that's a different day) - the point is that smell makes you do stuff.

Buy subs. Buy clothes, even. When our sense of sell is engaged, we do things. A lot of times, it's an intentional choice made by shop owners to induce us to spend our money; like steakhouses which use elaborate venting systems to send the scent of their grills outside so that the people outside come in. And who hasn't nearly choked at the entrances to the department stores at the mall, where they place the "best-smelling" colognes and people to attack you with them?

Just try walking into the South Bend Chocolate Company on Monument Circle, and not wanting to buy a chunk of fudge.

Oh, yeah. That's where I went after Penn Station. Delicious peanut butter fudge.

Class Retrospective :: 092208 (or: how to have fun with N people)

Telephone Pictionary = Best. Game. EVER.

Here's how it works:

Gather a group of n people (where n is somewhere between 5 and 10) around, and supply them each with n little index-card-sized pieces of paper (If you're keeping track, this means you'll need n-squared pieces of paper).

Then, round one begins. Everyone participating writes a sentence on the front of their particular piece of paper. It can be sensible or senseless; No worries! Mine was "When I eat skittles, I find that I can fly very, very fast."

After this, Round Two starts: everyone passes their stack of paper (the whole stack) one person to the left. The person reads the sentence, and then draws a picture on the next card that demonstrates what they think it means. Then they put the first piece of paper (the one with the sentence on it) on the bottom of the stack.

In Round Three, everyone passes their stack of paper to the person on their left. This person looks only at the picture- not at the sentence- and writes out a sentence that describes what they think the picture means. They then put the piece of paper with the first picture on the bottom of the stack.

Round Four continues the tradition of Round Two, and Round Five continues Round Three's noble heritage (You can see where this is going).

In Round n, the final drawings or sentences are placed upon the final cards, and the people can then flip the last card to the back. They can then flip through all n pages, laughing hysterically.

After this, they move on to Rounds n+1 through n+n, so that everyone can roll on the floor laughing. In our game, one of the books began "We left all of our t-shirts in the last town," finally concluding with "The queen gets really mad when she can't take a dump."

It's an incredible game. And you have n nonsensical stories to show for it! Who knows which of the cards could have an Academy Award-winning movie idea on it?

Anyway, I loved the last class. We should do it again. More of us. And more often.

For Your Consideration

What if, instead of buses, we rode giant dragons as mass transit?
What if Beth Lykins ate curry for breakfast every morning?
What if "truth in advertising" were enforced voraciously?
What if "truth in advertising" were not enforced at all?
What if the world were exactly the way we think it is?
What if gas went down to $0.10/gal next week?
What if we were all air-powered robots?
What if the value of Pi suddenly became 2.141592654...?
What if the value of pie suddenly became $100/lb?
What if all the ice in the world suddenly melted, and the greatest worry we had was that our lemonade would be warm?
What if parking at IUPUI were actually easy?
What if all our questions were answered by little imps that sat on our shoulders?
What if the word "orange" had a rhyme?
What if sexual intercourse were painful?
What if prohibition were re-enacted today?
What if road signs were designed by 14-year-old girls?
What if road signs were designed by 90-year-old men?
What if everything we needed, needed us instead?
What if McDonald's was considered "haute cuisine"?
What if McDonald's served haute cuisine?
What if we saw death as the beginning?
What if eating made you thinner and exercise made you fatter?
What if everyone got a chance to choose their race?
What if worms really did come in cans?
What if graffiti were admired, and art museums frowned upon?
What if "Fly Paper" was a periodical for insects?
What if someone lived in a self-storage facility?
What if schools had to be underwater?
?sdrawkcab gnihtyreve etorw lla ew fi rahW
¿uʍop-ǝpısdn ǝʇoɹʍ 11ɐ ǝʍ ɟı ʇɐɥʍ
What if most of the world still believed in sorcery?
What if priests' confessionals were also gas chambers?
What if a courthouse included an actual basketball court, in which the loser went to jail?
What if we all took everything literally?
What if ordinary citizens settled their differences with pistols at twenty paces?
What if the internet had existed in the Old West? (Gunfight at the OK/Cancel Corral)
What if video had been available to the ancient Romans? (Edit tu, Brute?)
What if today's political climate had been present during the Baroque period? (Barack me Obamadeus)
What if the ancient Egyptians had had iPods? (Rameses had a Zune)
What if we had the capability to travel back and forth through time at will?
What if Polka were considered "pop music?"
What if we all threw away our clothes once they were dirty?
What if the Civil War had never ended?
What if the Revolutionary War had never ended?
What if the Beatles were still recording today?
What if we already had commercial space tourism?
What if we made first contact with aliens next week?
What if we'd never heard of Wal-Mart?
What if we could swim in ice, walk on steam, and breathe water?
What if the world had developed to look like the "steampunk" sci-fi?

Class Retrospective :: 9/15/08

This was one of the most fun class discussions we've had yet.

Main Entry:

sub·vert (\səb-ˈvərt\)

Function:

transitive verb

Etymology:

Middle English, from Anglo-French subvertir, from Latin subvertere, literally, to turn from beneath, from sub- + vertere to turn — more at worth

Date:

14th century

1 : to overturn or overthrow from the foundation : ruin

Subversion is a lot of fun. I thought that discussing ways of breaking rules without breaking them was very interesting. I also thought it was good to recognize that the only way to successfully subvert the rules is, in fact, to know them and know how to follow them first. It's only through knowing the purpose for the rules that you can break or bend them while they still have the same effect. In essence, it's why looking both ways keeps jaywalking from killing us!

But now, I can't think of anything else when I'm on the road: How can I go straight through the red light without stopping?

It's About Time

I find something delicious in the fact that I used "Back to the Future" in a project about time.

Oh, and this indeed is my submission for the "It's About Time" project.

Thoughts on Time

This isn't my submission. I just wanted to toss down some thoughts on time.

Take a look at your reflection in a mirror. Is that you? Right now? Are you sure? Maybe you changed a fraction of a second ago, and the light just hasn't reached your eyes yet. You're always looking into the past.

It's kind of ludicrous for me to think I can comment on the current status of the world. As soon as I've finished typing this sentence, things may have changed entirely! Once this post is up, the world might be gone! As soon as we're back in class on Monday, the Large Hadron Collider will have been activated; maybe it will have created a black hole and ended all life as we know it. You should probably refresh this page to make sure.

These words still here? Good.

Light from the sun takes eight minutes to get here. If the Sun were to wink out right now, we'd not have the foggiest notion for long enough to watch a viral video. Twice.

Scientists say that time travel is impossible; but we're always looking into the past and we move into the future at one second per second every day of the week.

So what is my project going to be on?

Good question.

uo!sנaΛu! + sweנб!qwe

Gibberish? Actually, no. If you'll invert your computer monitor (or just take a screenshot and rotate it 180° in Photoshop) you'll be able to read the title of this post (that is, if you have Cyrillic and Hebrew encoding available on your machine). Why? Because I read the page in The Art of Looking Sideways ostensibly numbered 245.

Huh?

Here's the deal: the page is umop ap!sdn - so I decided to do the same, and flip this blog post upside down. Or, at least the title.

Now, if you don't have Cyrillic or Hebrew (or maybe you're just too lazy), the title of this post is "ambigrams + inversion" - so what is an Ambigram?

Again, assuming you're too lazy to click this link, I'll tell you. An ambigram is a word or sentence that can be read the same upside down as right-side up. Obviously, the title of this post is NOT an ambigram, as it can't be read right-side up (and barely so, upside down). But the one to the left of this post, the 20th anniversary edition of the Princess Bride DVD, is. Go ahead, flip it over!

Ambigrams fascinate me. So much so that I created my own:

Okay, so you have to sort of squint and imagine lines where there aren't any, but if you look closely, you might see that it says "ilinamorato"!

Not bad for an experiment, I'd say.

The Egg Project

This image was a lot of fun to create. I was thinking about the idea of becoming an egghead myself, and I decided that my little egg - Romeo Omulet (his wife's name is Juliet Scramblague) - was a silicon valley magnate in the video game industry. So here it is!

Even without looking too closely, you can see several little puns. Puzzles designed to "Crack your shell," for instance; my little guy's name being Romeo "Omulet" (I blame my roommate for that one) -- even "Egghead" magazine. I hope you got these puns. I'm just yolking with you.

Now this post is over (easy). I can email you the full size image if you ask for it; just comment with your email address.