Image courtesy In Praise of Sardines

I have found the perfect pizza. And, even though I have never travelled to Italy, I doubt even those prodigious purveyors of pizza could best the ambrosial pies to be found at Ken's Artisan Pizza here in superlative meriting Portland, Oregon.

Before I go any further, however, I should note that I have atypical taste in pizza. The crust, in my mind, should be thin, crisp and golden. Neither soggy, nor pale nor puffy, like the inferior sort found on those peculiar pan pizzas. The sauce — should the pizza have any — ought be applied gently and with moderation. If I wanted my food to ooze I would eat an eclair. Finally, the prefect pizza has a minimal number of toppings. None of this "Supreme" lunacy with every animal, vegetable and mineral under the sun crammed onto the surface of the pie.

The craftspersons at Ken's Artisan Pizza manage to satisfy those tree criteria with almost frightening perfection.

I ordered a Pizza Margarita, the classic tomato, mozzarella and basil pie, which easily bested the now second best pizza I have ever consumed. Cooked in a wood burning brick oven, which — by the looks of the mammoth hearth — reaches dizzyingly high temperatures, the crust achieved a beautiful golden brown color and crunched generously — though not too much — when I parted it with my knife. And Kudos to Ken's for providing a steak knife, with some real teeth, as pizzerias do in Europe. Or at least France.

The toppings were minimal. My pie had a smattering of savory tomato sauce, and just enough basil that I felt a burst of its fresh aroma every now and again, but not so much as to overpower savor the preternaturally delicious crust. A harmonious balance, really.

Food aside, the legendary Wait was just that: a legend. The only time spent standing came as the charming hostesses attend to the dozen or so patrons ahead in the line.

The restaurant itself looked lovely enough. On a balmy summer evening, the wide open windows let in a pleasant breeze.

Ken's Artisan Pizza. It's pretty great.

Of all the horrible staples of college life, one stands out in my mind as the most obnoxious. Some might focus their attention on the dunderheaded folks who disrupt everyone's sleep by holding loud conversations about meaningless jibber-jabber at 4 AM. Others might (quite erroneously, in my opinion) bemoan the insipidity of the muffins. But neither of those two problems have any relevance or weight when compared to the Internet access here at Bates.

I doubt there exists another system even a tenth as convoluted as the system deployed on the Bates campus. It took me no less than three hours to connect my laptop to the Internet for the first time. Three hours! What is more, had it not been for the serendipitous presence and wonderful benevolence of someone a floor down from me, the process might have taken even longer.

For, to correctly authenticate with the network, I needed to install a security certificate on my computer. But, to obtain the certificate, I needed an Internet connection. It took a second computer, with a functioning Internet connection, to put my computer online. Insanity.

Coercing the software to cooperate, however, is only the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. First, there is the software itself. The Cisco Clean Access Agent, companion software product to the infamous Cisco NAC Appliance, is, at least on the Macintosh, poorly-written, dysfunctional and mildly parasitic. When it fails to do a mediocre job connecting me to the Internet, the Clean Access Agent throws caution to the wind, causing kernel panics, forcing restarts, and crashing iTunes. The software also seems to have trouble realizing it has not successfully connected me to the Internet on some occasions. In the five weeks I have been using the software, I have uninstalled and reinstalled it at least four dozen times because it cannot correctly determine the status of my connection.

Then there is the quality of the Internet access itself. On most days it makes me dream of dial-up. My iPhone, connected to the Internet via molasses-like EDGE and operating on a relatively pokey 600 MHz ARM processor, can usually load pages faster than my dual-core laptop connected to the college network. I suspect the problem is twofold. On the one hand, the college needs to realize that, what with YouTube, iTunes and easy videoconferencing, students use far more bandwidth than the college has. Time to upgrade to a zippier connection, as it were. On the other, the software on the network's routers do an awful job of traffic shaping. I have little doubt that some tiny, self-serving group of people suck up 90 percent of the college's bandwidth downloading reruns of Baywatch after classes end at four.

As if the lamentable software, awful connection quality and convoluted installation procedure were not enough, however, I also cannot connect my iPhone to the campus WiFi network. Despite the fact that no third-party software can be installed on the iPhone now, and the fact that Apple would never be sufficiently insane to allow third-parties access to the kind of low-level APIs an iPhone Clean Access Client would need, the college categorically refuses to allow the iPhone onto the NAC Appliance's mythical "white list." Without any authorization, the phone has no Internet access via WiFi. I particularly like the laconic response the IT department sent in response to my email inquiring into the subject of iPhone WiFi access:

I cannot decide whether the "NO" was intended to be in all caps. Regardless, I would have appreciated the "why" behind the senseless policy.

To me, the fact I cannot connect my device to the network is a breach of good morals. It is as if the college were issuing a ban on filling pitchers of a certain shape with the dormitory tap water. I pay a share of the costs associated with the Internet connection, network hardware and its upkeep, thus I should be permitted to use the connection on any device, so long as it does not harm the group. I hardly see my accessing email, browsing maps of Berlin or reading the New York Times on my phone with the help of the campus WiFi network as a violation of that implicit contract.

I joined the Facebook group, Clean Access is the Bane of My Existence, though, with only 13 members as of now, I doubt it will have much of an impact in the near-term. I almost feel as if more direct, outspoken action is necessary to deal with this most troublesome of problems.

There is nothing quite like the smell of alcohol in the morning. But such is life in my dormitory. Or, perhaps, life in any college dormitory. Needless to say, I continue to adjust slowly to life without the luxury of carpet below my feet. (Though that particular problem will be remedied once I manage to pick out a rug.)

Given the less than vibrant restaurant scene in Lewiston, Maine, it is quite fortunate that the dining services folks here at Bates serve food leaps and bounds beyond what I have consumed on other college campuses. In particular, I have nothing but praise for the Bates muffins. They are simply divine. The scones erred a little on the moist side, and the green tea on offer lacks the kind of intense, bitter flavor I like, but the muffins positively cannot be beat.

My second food-related complaint — the lack of luscious crusty bread — may soon be remedied. The fancy new (and mysteriously air conditioning free) commons building, according to one of the officials on hand for questions, has a magnificent oven capable of producing wonderful, hearty bread in the blink of an eye. What I would not give for a just-baked baguette! It has been weeks now, since I have sunk my teeth into something as scrumptious.

More academically speaking, the fine art we call linear algebra, for better or worse, has not posed nearly as much of a challenge as I thought it would. The study of linear algebra, though, has not made me any more fond of matrices. They still torment me like some kind of awful, pestilent disease. Some might argue that, with a calculator, matrices "aren't that bad." But typing matrices into a calculator, or a computer, for that matter, is a process highly prone to errors.

The opposite holds true for my French literature class. Reading Flaubert, Maupassant, Baudelaire and Apollinaire, and writing two six-hundred word literary analyses in French — all in the space of four weeks — takes a certain amount of effort. Having said that, reading French literature makes me feel very smug. Whether I can justify that smugness, however, is another question entirely.

With my vast quantities of free time and the release of Apple's Leopard operating system just around the corner, I thought I would revive my long abandoned effort to build a better piece of computerized recipe organization software.

At some point, as I was debugging a rather troublesome sheet, it struck me that the real coup de grâce of a recipe management program would be the ability to dump a bunch of text into a box and have the software parse it into a recipe. What began as a simple idea has now become a rather bothersome thorn in my side. Despite what some people may think, computers are extraordinarily stupid machines.

My first attempt to teach a computer to decipher a recipe involved a set of fairly simplistic rules, based mostly upon a crude analysis of the first characters on each line. As anyone who knows anything about programming would probably guess, such an approach is more or less useless. My simplistic approach did a fairly good job of parsing ingredients like, "1 cup flour," but it failed miserably when it came to the title, number of servings and just about every other point of data contained in a recipe.

So, I started to analyze recipes from a grammatical point of view, in the hope that I could somehow use grammatical differences and trends in recipes to parse them more effectively. I think I have now analyzed the grammatical differences in about five dozen recipes, and I have found a handful of interesting trends.

When I actually set about programming the parser to test my theories, however, I realized that I had no way to analyze grammar programatically. Sure, Apple added the "hasSuffix:" method to their lovely strings, but hasSuffix: cannot tell me how many words a string contains or whether the string is written in the past or present tense.

Fortunately, Apple has included a wonderful programming paradigm called the "category" in Objective-C. With it, even the most naive programmer can add methods to any existing class without creating a subclass of the class he or she would like to extend. It is absolutely brilliant. And, with any luck I should have some kind of parser working in the next week.

I did not enjoy watching The Wizard of Oz. And that horrible "Over the Rainbow" song tends to give me headaches. But I cannot possibly imagine life without a brain, like that poor scarecrow fellow. Trying to bestow the gift of logical deduction to an idiotic machine is exhaustingly painful.

Everyone loves text-based Internet advertisements. Investors love them, consumers love them and, if koalas could use the Internet, they would love them too. With the promise of fantastic "ROI" (or "return on investment") and the fantastic reach, I thought Internet advertising was the only place to be. So, to promote my fledgling enterprise, I signed up for a Google AdWords account. The results have neither shocked nor awed me. For that matter they have barely perturbed my utterly enervated aura.

Of course, I would never have harbored the delusion of seeing a thousand-fold increase in business after eight hours. I did, however, expect to see some kind of impact. But, as of now, not a single person so much as clicked on one of my text ads, despite the fact that, according to Google, over two hundred sets of eyes have now viewed them. So even if, in the next ten minutes, just one person clicked on one of my advertisements, my total "click though rate," or "CTR" for those in the know, would be around half a percent.

Perhaps it takes time to garner results. Maybe I should have taken Google's suggestion to heart and set a monthly advertising budget of over $100. Or, I suppose I might have chosen the wrong keywords. Regardless, I hope this whole text advertisement shebang managers to have some impact. Otherwise I will have wasted $35 on yet another chimera.

My trip to Paris began pleasantly enough. I walked into the airport, checked bags, queued for security, bought some hot chocolate at the Coffee People kiosk and found my gate. Soon thereafter, however, two harbingers of disaster foreshadowed my pain to come. First, I spilled several ounces of hot chocolate down the front of my shirt, which, thankfully, came off after a liberal rinsing in the disgusting airport bathroom. Second, the batteries in my newly purchased Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones died prematurely.

But I failed to see the signs. I shrugged off the twenty minute delay, figuring that in a summer rife with air traffic problems a twenty-minute delay was to be expected. On the runway I silently applauded the pilot's decision to keep us grounded an extra ten minutes, as a brilliantly executed move that would squeeze us into the Philadelphia arrivals schedule. Five hours later a string of unfortunate events jolted me from my naïve reverie.

To capture the epic scale of my disastrous experience on US Airways, I began writing my account of the experience in the form of a Bible chapter. Three hours later, however, I had only managed to account for a fourth of the airline's missteps. So, rather than spend twelve hours writing, I have decided to tell the story with a more conventional form of prose, though, at a later date. Read on for the first fourth in biblical verse.

Rather than begin the account of my latest Parisian adventure with the often comical, but entirely unpleasant, experience of flying on US Airways, I will instead begin with the food, which was mostly wonderful. Some of the eateries, mostly those chosen for their convenient locations rather than the quality of their food, did not serve up the kind of delicacies that I expected. Others, however, surprised me with their delightful blend of value, charm and good cooking.

Read on for the itemized account.

Mention of the Bose brand in conversation usually results in one of two discussions. Audiophiles sneer and assert that Bose ought be called "blows" for the mediocre audio quality its products offer. The rest of the world praises the ear-pleasing audio quality of Bose speakers, but recoils slightly at their inflated prices. Despite these differences, however, everyone can agree that the Bose brand oozes pretense.

Not that Bose does anything to make their image less ostentatious. Their advertising never makes mention of the price, as if to associate their Wave Radio or Lifestyle speaker systems with other super-premium luxury items whose price is only disclosed to the small portion of America's bourgeoisie who can afford them.

And, on one level, I wholeheartedly concur with the audiophiles. Bose speakers always imbue music with an excess of something I can only describe as "cheer." They make Bartök and Kabalevsky sound almost uplifting — something that, to anyone who knows anything about classical music, is conceptually impossible. I also cannot fathom why Bose sets such outrageous prices. They must have fantastic margins. When it comes to noise-canceling technology, however, Bose QuietComfort headphones set the bar for quality. David Pogue could not be more correct when he says, "The world just falls away," in his review of noise canceling headphones.

So, when my previous pair of noise canceling cans — a venerable set of Sennheiser PXC250 headphones — decided to malfunction a few weeks ago, I figured I would splurge and buy the best.

For the most part, the Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones meet my expectations. My Bartök sounds a trifle too jolly to be Russian, and the noise cancelation is marvelous. The included carrying case, however, contained something so incredibly pretentious I burst out laughing.

Inside the padded carrying case Bose provides a dozen business cards, which state:

Bose has redefined the meaning of narcissistic. Not only do they think the customer will love their headphones, they also seem convinced that total strangers, who merely catch sight of the Bose logo painted subtly on the side of the earphone, will inquire about the product's loveliness.

Frankly, I think Bose would probably do better business if they dispensed with their air of snobbery and, instead, appealed to the average American. It is the average American, after all, who would want speakers with a touch of added cheer.

Knows It's Not a Bee
Unlike my other, defective iPod, Apple's replacement does not buzz whilst I listen to music

Today, for instance, I took my iPod to one of Apple's famed Genius Bars address the strange buzzing my iPod had begun to emit during music playback. The Genius donned a pair of headphones and informed me that he had, "Never seen anything like this before." What cosmic forces conspired to sell me the one iPod of millions that had a strange buzzing issues I will never know. To Apple's credit, however, the Genius did give me a brand new iPod to replace my defective model that clearly missed its calling as a bee.

But the recent "Defect at the Apple Store" saga does not end there.

A week ago I purchased an iPhone -- hands down the best cell phone I have ever used -- but I had been bothered by a slight looseness on the lower left side of the device's lower plastic antenna cover. So, having waited forty-five minutes to see a Genius, I brandished my steel and black communicator and inquired about the gauche give. As it turns out, that too constituted a defect. So the Genius also replaced my iPhone.

I must commend Apple for so deftly handling this issue. Rarely do I walk into a store with two broken gizmos and walk out an hour later with two fully-functional replacements. Though I would really appreciate it if a consumer electronics company saved me from having to replace the gadget in the first place.

A Deterrent?
Why bother adding this annoying beige doodad if it doesn't actually serve a purpose?

The story begins this very afternoon, when I decided to do a touch of shopping. After successful trips to several stores, I popped into my local neighborhood Nordstrom establishment to buy some socks. Of course, I could not help make an impulse buy: a pair of those fancy-shmancy "Seven" jeans. Nothing particularly unusual. Forty-five minutes after entering, I left the store quite content with my socks and denim in bag.

But, as seems to happen with many of my endeavors, something went wrong. When I pulled the jeans out of the bright red shopping bag and unfolded them, I noticed that the small plastic security device had not been removed at the point-of-sales terminal. I have yet to make the return trip to the store to have it removed, though it really irks me that the salesperson failed to remove the tag.

More so than that, however, this incident makes me wonder why the store bothers to put the tags on the clothes. I walked out of the store and, to the best of my knowledge, no loud alarm sounded. To me, this means that any run-of-the-mill shoplifter could easily have swiped the jeans and waltzed right out of the store. This too also seems like a lose-lose situation for shareholders: the merchandise is no more secure and the system is expensive to implement in maintain.

So, a note to retailers: make it safe or forget about it. And, either way, please tell your employees to remove the blasted security devices!

As the banal phrase goes, Rome was not built in a day. Similarly, thirty days does not a great novel make, as I have discovered in the last three weeks.

For almost three weeks ago today, for whatever insane reason, I decided to — certainly not for the first time — challenge myself. But instead of attempting a set of insanely difficult math problems I have endeavored to write (or, perhaps more aptly, type) a fifty-thousand word novel in thirty days. For my English class, of course. Insane? Yes. Painful? Yes. Rewarding? Potentially.

At first the idea seemed a good one: I had an idea for a novel, but I never actually sat down to write it. With this project for my English class I could kill two birds with one stone. The first draft of the novel would be complete and I would help myself succeed in English.

Yet, three weeks into the project, it is beginning to wear me down. So far, I have written a pitiful 25,817 words, which puts me slightly behind the recommended target that, mathematically, one should have reached by this point in the thirty-day novel writing process.

My real problem stems from a lack of planning. The idea I had for my mystery-thriller novel was very vague and, with only thirty days to write the book, I did not spend as much time planning out the various twists and turns the plot would take beforehand. This lack of planning has manifested itself in numerous plot incongruities that will have to be ironed out later.

Frankly, I just want to cross the fifty-thousand word mark to assure myself that such a feat can be accomplished. I imagine that I will feel less internal resistance toward the notion of writing a novel, perhaps in sixty or ninety days and with more planning, knowing that I can weave a fifty-thousand word tale.

(Read the prologue after the discontinuation).

A number of months ago in November, I wrote the entry, An Enigma and a Mystery, which, in its second part, chronicled my discovery of a contingency of people on LiveJournal that had serendipitously unearthed my blog. Later that same day I reported my preliminary findings after a few minutes of research. But recently, more information has come to light and the strange saga has a new wrinkle or two.

According to two well-placed sources, the initial discovery of this blog by the aforementioned contingency came after a beleaguered and exhausted student read The Picture of Dorian Gray for her English class. As anyone forced to write a 20-page literary analysis would, she hated the book. Then, at some point after that, she stumbled upon my 2006 Christmas Wish List, which included Oscar Wilde's Picture book. For her own inscrutable reasons, said person decided that this blog was somewhat noteworthy, posting something on her LiveJournal. Social networking took over from that point and the mad dash to read my blog began.

In fact, the person who initially stumbled upon my lovely little blog has developed such an intense level of reverence for either me or my blog that I was asked for an autograph, on her behalf, by my two informants. It's not the first time someone has requested an autograph, though it was the first time that I obliged such a request. I cannot decide whether or not to embrace this niche notoriety, though it would make a great anecdote for someone writing about the power of the Internet.

Granted, many questions remain unanswered in my mind. I see a part three in the future.

I hate being sick. Especially when I happen to fall ill just before my birthday and just in time for me to deprive myself of the chance to host my school's Rose Festival Ambassador selection ceremony. Yes, I can attest to the fact that it is immensely pleasurable to spend one's eighteenth birthday in bed with a runny nose, sore throat, and 250 milligrams of antibiotics floating around in one's bloodstream.

Granted, I do feel much better today, though this disease could not have picked a more inopportune time to ravage my sinuses. After all, while I need only take the antibiotics for five days, according to my doctor, I am still considered medically sick for ten. In other words, I will spend the entirety of my spring vacation with a sinus infection.

It could have been much worse, I suppose. I might have been in China right now, had my parents followed through with their plan to go there for our spring break vacation. The Chinese probably have adequate doctors and the like, but even when I was in France over the summer, I had the sense that medical care in the United States really is the best.

But I digress. A few days ago — probably when I was more sick and bedridden earlier in the week — Princeton had the courtesy to inform me that application decisions will go online at 5 PM eastern on 29 March. This does two things. Firstly, it lends even more credence to my argument that, of the many schools I applied to, Princeton is the best. Secondly, and more importantly, it makes me very nervous. I know I have a very good chance of being admitted, but with an 8 percent acceptance rate, it does make me just the slightest bit squeamish.

I hope that the illustrious people at Princeton will have some mercy on me and send me a big white envelope with very good news inside.

On Tuesday I made my first foray into the world of online peer-to-peer file sharing. It was not pleasant. In fact, I now firmly believe that the MPAA, the RIAA and any other groups that represent copyright holders have no reason to worry about the so-called file sharing threat threat. The countless millions (or perhaps even billions) of dollars dispensed by such organizations to sue teenagers for downloading low-quality pre-release copies of Bring It On 3 would have been better spent trying to make better movies.

At any rate, I tried to download the first season of 24, which took an exceedingly long time. In fact, it took nearly three days of continuous, slow-moving downloading to put the 7.5 GB file onto my hard drive. By my calculations, it would only have taken about ten hours, had the download moved at the full speed of my DSL.

But the fund did not end there. When the download finally finished, I discovered that the file did not contain twenty-four episodes of 24, but rather twenty-two episodes of Gilmore Girls. I will admit that Gilmore Girls was not as insipid as I had imagined, however, it has a certain deficit of edginess.

I have no idea why the movie studios are trying to curb this illegal downloading. If my experience is typical, then anyone who tries it will probably arrive at the same conclusion: spend the $35 and download the season on iTunes.

The other day, I left a fountain pen laying on a table at school. When I realized that I had failed to properly stash my stylish stylo, I figured that whoever happened upon it would probably take it for his or her betterment. And, as I discovered the next day, I was right. But I could always go online and buy another one. Or so I thought.

Apparently, MUJI, the Japanese company who manufactured the purloined pen, stopped making my model months ago. I visited MUJI's website, at mujionline.com, only to discover that they did not so much as list the pen as "sold out." Then I visited the MoMA Design Store's online storefront, at momastore.com, which also lacked the writing instrument I wanted to replace. Even eBay — where it's usually possible to locate anything — didn't have it.

All of this left me in an uncomfortable siutation. Of course, many manufacturers still produce fountain pens, however, those companies also have a strange tendency to charge upwards of $100 per pen. And while those pens might dash more fluidly across the page or better resist nib corrosion, I would prefer not to risk losing a $100 pen. By contrast, my MUJI model cost just $16, and it wrote at least half as well as my high-priced Waterman Carène. The MUJI's slick anodized aluminum finish also complemented my computing ensemble quite nicely.

I may buy something from Lamy, but I doubt that, dollar for dollar, it will work as well as the MUJI pen I lost. Frankly, I cannot see why MUJI stopped making the pen. It was an exemplary pen for the money and it looked slick too.

As I have a startling lack of homework, I figured that I could afford to spend more time attempting to discern the context in which a certain LiveJournal user set a spate of referrals upon my website. When last I checked, nearly 20 different LiveJournals had linked to my website - if only via their "Friends" pages - with the result that nearly 90 new unique visitors have paid a visit. While I cannot honestly say this influx of hits altered my visitor count in any largely perceptible way, this entirely new pocket of visitors has aroused my curiosity.

At any rate, I did some additional digging and I stumbled upon the LiveJournal of one fidget62 - whose real name I refrain from using solely because I find most people's chosen screen-names quite amusing. Her blog that provided at least some context for this new pocket of readers. It makes me quite happy to think that, based upon the rather faint details provided by Ms. fidget62's LiveJournal, someone happened to serendipitously stumble upon my blog and found it amusing enough to write about. In a sense, progress.

Still, I would like to see the original context in which some mysterious author recommended my humble blog to a new pocket of people, or - perhaps more importantly - discover how this mysterious person found my blog in the first place.

(On an almost entirely unrelated note, I must express my great esteem that fidget62 decided to use the 24-hour clock in one of her posts. It reminds me of my own insistence that the day of the week must go before the month: 1 December 2006 instead of December 1, 2006.)

Much to the delight of home fitness equipment manufacturers, the Thanksgiving holiday will take place this coming Thursday. So, students across the nation have begun or will begin their Thanksgiving breaks at some point during the week. At my school that break began today, at around half-past eleven, following an wholly unproductive "half-day" of school.

For whatever reason, the administrators at my school decided that, with only half a day to educate us this week, they would have us come to school and attend each of our classes for a wholesome 26 minutes. In theory, this plan is imbecilic. In practice it's even worse.

Today, I accomplished next to nothing in the four-ish hours I spent at school. I helped one beleaguered classmate with her crossword puzzle - though I really only managed to fill in one or two clues - and I managed to solve a handful of organic chemistry problems with help from the two people in that class who had not begun to dance or play "hacky sack."

Anyone with half a brain should have realized that students and teachers would accomplish next to nothing in 26 minute class periods.

Teachers cannot possibly teach anything in 26 minutes. Reasonably, it takes ten minutes to let the class settle in and perhaps another five, at the end, to let them prepare to leave. On any other day with hour-plus periods, a teacher has at least 45 minutes to impart knowledge. With 26, on the other hand, they have almost none.

As such, students will do what students will do: digress into strange behavior. Giving students the entire day off would have been far more productive even if every student only managed to finish one math problem at some point between the hours of 8:15 and 11:30 AM.

I have no idea who dreamt up such vapid a schedule, but he or she desperately needs a potent injection of intelligence.

I have come to the conclusion that the College Board - an organization which has caused me a great deal of grief - has a very warped view of what aspects of our culture potential college students should and should not be familiar with.

On the critical reading section of the SAT, the questions seem to require test takers to have familiarity with all sorts of English literature from nearly every century. One practice test I took, for instance, had a question that went something like this:

Lord Driveldrum was unable to take delivery of his oolong tea because the ---------- was sick in Lincolnshire.

The correct answer was "stevedore" - a person employed, or a contractor engaged, at a dock to load and unload cargo from ships, according to Oxford - which I managed to guess after eliminating the other four choices. But, unless the test taker happens to be familiar with all of the other options, he or she would have to be incredibly familiar with 18th century British literature to correctly answer the question with any certainty.

On the other hand, the College Board seems to think that prospective undergraduates do not need any familiarity with watershed pieces of literature. The most recent SAT, which I took Sunday, had a story that made an allusion to Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But for one reason or another, the College Board felt it needed to add an asterisk to inform test-takers that Captain Nemo was a character in Verne's novel.

It makes absolutely no sense to hold students to such an arbitrary cultural standard. If the College Board wants to ensure that students have some sort of familiarity with our culture, then they should stop explaining such obvious allusions. If, on the other hand, the College Board wants to make the test accessible to as many people as possible, they should remove every obscure cultural reference in the test.

My opinion of the College Board diminishes by the second.

One would think that a second-year calculus class at the high school level would be composed of a small, yet well-behaved and eager group of students. However, my second year calculus class shatters every preconceived notion that any reasonable person might have about such a class.

Really, the spectacle is quite ironic: the most advanced math class at my high school is, by far, the most unproductive and unruly group of students I have ever seen. People routinely jump from desk to desk, spontaneously break out in song, or leave class for indeterminate amounts of time with no warning whatsoever. How my math teacher can cope with the obstreperous nature of my class, let alone teach it, is beyond me. I find it even more surprising to think that nearly every student in last year's second year calculus class, which, by all accounts, behaved in an equally unruly manner, managed to pass the Advanced Placement test with a four or a five. Granted, the AB-level (as opposed to the BC-level) calculus Advanced Placement test, which I took last May, did not prove terribly difficult.

To be fair, the class does spend the first third of the year reviewing topics that everyone in the class had previously covered at one point or another, which may account for the restlessness. If it were up to me, the class would spend the first week, or two weeks, reviewing the concepts covered in the last year, to bring us back up to speed after a summer spent idly, and then zip through all of the BC-level topics. That would, hopefully motivate everyone, and the class could actually provide a grounding in higher-level math concepts, like linear algebra or first-order ODEs.

The real test will come when the class moves into uncharted waters. If we still behave like a group of untrained baboons, then I will declare the class the year's first victim of senioritis.

The school year is almost done,
I dare say it's been rather fun!

Final examinations, the palpable indication that summer is just days away, have once again descended upon high school students in many corners of the country. Today's pallet of pain consisted of a rather mild mix of poetry recitation and role-play.

The poetical appreciation presentations went off without a hitch; by some miracle my English class managed to plow through at least twenty in the space of an hour and a half. Having publicly appreciated a poet on Friday, I sat back and allowed my fellow students to beguile me with verse. Overall, the quality of the presentations was quite high. However, the compressed nature of the presentations detracted from the exercise; I would have enjoyed hearing more about some of the poets.

In government, the role-play examination seemed a little wonky. A lack of realism, comprised the most glaring problem. The first question, for example, which put the testee in the position of a newly elected president in the process of composing an inaugural address, had some glaring inaccuracies. The president does not use the inaugural address to speak about specific policies, as the question indicated with its more detailed instructions. Typically, the inaugural address outlines a handful of broad polices while inspiring listeners with stirring rhetoric. Of course, the State of the Union address does contain the president's specific suggestions for tackling specific problems. The final had noble intentions to be sure, but its execution left something to be desired.

Two down, four to go.

People who cannot understand why some students in the United States are falling behind students in Europe and Asia clearly have no idea what actually takes place in the classroom. Take the Moot Court Activity my government class has taken to engaging in. While some of the participants have stuck to the Constitutional question proposed by the case, the majority have spent far too much time discussing irrelevant information. Yesterday, it became necessary for me to reprimand the court when the chief justice decided to ask my co-counsel an entirely irrelevant question that dealt with the morality of prayer in schools. The Supreme Court does not deal with moral questions, it rules on questions of the Constitutional variety.

If these people cannot so much as stick to the Constitutional question, they should, at least, put forth their best effort to emulate the court procedure. The chief justice does not need need to object to interrupt one of the lawyers. Typically, the justices start speaking and the lawyer stops speaking. For that matter, the justices often interrupt each other.

Of course, objecting superfluously cannot begin to compare with the misuse of the word "incentive." Incertitude between, say, "all intensive purposes" and "all intents and purposes" (the former being the correct phrase), might garner more understanding and sympathy. But someone with a gun and in the process of robbing a house does not have incentive to kill. Intent, perhaps, but not incentive. Generally, I think of an incentive as, perhaps, a coupon for a free drink at Starbucks with the purchase of two pounds of coffee.

So maybe - just maybe - my class should pass that vague and extreme "increase in school funding bill." But that is yet another sorrowful tale.

Desperate and thirsty at the airport gate in Los Angeles, I found myself in a sticky situation. I could either wait for the drink service on the plane to reach me - where United would provide me with a thimble-sized container of water - or, I could part with four dollars and purchase an overpriced beverage at the Starbucks just feet from the gate. Like the average corruptible American, I chose to brave the Starbucks.

In truth, my tall vanilla bean crème Frappuccino turned out to taste quite good. So good in fact, I actually considered buying another when life afforded me the opportunity. However, without the same beverage-related constraints upon me, my choice the second time was far more logical; I did not indulge in another Frappuccino.

(Though, incidentally, I did discover that the LAX Starbucks charges about 5-10 percent more for their drinks than the half-dozen in my neighborhood.)

Rather, I resolved to discover the secret chemical formula that would enable me to manufacture vanilla bean crème Frappuccino drinks in my lab. Indeed, after some careful prodding on Google, I came upon the recipe, which involved a handful of simple ingredients.

Jubilant at the breakthrough, I rushed to concoct my very own Frappuccino. I tossed the ice, nonfat milk, soy beverage mix, and vanilla flavoring into the blender and flicked it on. After several minutes of whirring and whining, I stopped the blender, figuring that it had made enough noise to shake someone out of an Ambien-induced sleepwalk.

The inside of my blender was something to behold.

All told, it managed to partially chafe about one of the dozen or so ice cubes I added. The others remained mostly cubic, aside from the minute amounts of melting that took place.

Bearing in my that the blender in my kitchen had spent a good twenty plus years blending this, that, and the other, I decided the time had come for a replacement. My first thought was the $400 Vita-Mix, which has a two horse power motor, putting it on equal footing with many chainsaws. One review claimed it could turn cold cheese into hot fondue in four minutes. However, $400 is a lot of money for a blender.

In my moment of need, I turned to the experts at Cook's Illustrated magazine. They recommended the much more reasonable $40 Oster Designer 12-speed blender. Initially, I had doubts about the Frappuccino making abilities of such a blender. But Cook's had never led me astray before.

As people say, there exists a first time for everything. And this was the first time that Cook's failed me. While the Oster managed to attack the ice with more vigor than my other blender, it still left behind several large chunks. Overall, the beverage also had the consistency of roughly crushed saltine crackers with a handful of small rocks added for good measure.

Alone, confused, and without a blender: c'est moi. I may visit the kitchen gadget emporium several more times and try the other models Cook's felt did a good job of pulverizing ice. However, if none of those pan out, there is always the Vita-Mix.

To the many people who under the impression that my Podcast would be "on the air," so to speak, I must apologize. I have come down with a rather nasty cold, which has diminished my ability to put the finishing touches on the first episode. My voice definitely does not sound good enough for recording just now.

After sickness plagued my body Friday and the better part of Saturday, it was a real relief to finally find myself in a position where I could make myself useful. So, as I enjoy it so much, I decided to do some cooking. Having replenished my supply of granola and followed by scone making, I chose to construct palmiers (pictured). However, when they came out of the oven after sixteen wholesome minutes, they looked as if their growth had been stunted. Rather than blowing up into magnificent sinuous golden-brown confections, they puffed up a bit and turned brown. Tasting revealed an overly dense, cake-like texture, as opposed to the normal light, flaky texture.

Frankly, I am baffled as to why the palmiers turned out as they did. For one thing, it is virtually impossible to ruin these comely coffee companions. I simply rolled a sheet of pre-made puff pastry in sugar, diced it with a bench scraper, brushed a little egg wash on top and threw them into a four hundred degree oven.

Oh well. The scones taste terribly terrific.

My former mechanical pencil, which was falling apart, finally met its demise on Thursday, when I lost it. I have no idea what happened to it, but I no longer have it in my possession. As such, it became necessary to find a new pencil. Going through one day (today) with a regular pencil was somewhat painful. At first I considered getting the same thing I had previously, which was a Japanese import, but then decided against it. Eventually I stumbled across a Swiss company, Caran d'Ache, who makes very nice writing instruments. Some of their products are a bit on the expensive side, but I was able to find a very nice all-metal pencil for $16. So far I have found it to be better than my old pencil, and it was actually made in Switzerland.

From the other side of the world, comes Uniqlo, a really great Japanese clothing retailer. They sell all sorts of high-quality basic clothing for incredibly low prices, with impeccably good service. From what I have read it sounds like Gap quality clothing for Old Navy prices with Saks Fifth Avenue service. Sounds pretty good to me. I just wish the first stores in the US were opening somewhere closer than New Jersey.

SAT Question - Complete the Sentence:

Joseph was quite ------- with the -------- person who coughed while he was taking the SAT.
A) enamored, fascinating
B) thrilled, prepossessing
C) absorbed, entertaining
D) nettled, vapid
E) affable, charming

The SAT and all related entities are trademarks of the College Entrance Examination Board.

The answer is D) nettled, vapid.

Explanation: While taking the SAT today Joseph was trapped in a stuffy room with a very vapid person who coughed, sneezed, sniffed and spewed for, essentially, the entire three hour and forty-five minute testing period. While he has confidence he did not bomb the test, he nonetheless feels his performance was hampered by the obnoxious child.

Going back into the first person - today I took what is now called the "SAT Reasoning Test," complete with essay, easy math questions, and dull as death passages to read. However, as the faux SAT question indicates, I was quite upset with the obnoxious person who I got stuck in a room with. I do not actually know this person, but they were (really, really) annoying.

Other than that annoyance, I feel fairly good, this being the first time I took the test. There were a few passage-based questions that were confusing, but otherwise things went rather smoothly. I doubt I got a score I will be happy with, mostly because of the annoying person, who distracted me quite often. The next time I take the SAT I will be bringing earplugs, though I hope I am not forced to use them.

My first attempt at soup to school proved to be a failure. The French onion soup, which tasted fabulous right out of the pot, turned out tasting abysmal when reheated and kept in an insulated cylindrical container (hey, I don't want to endorse a particular brand). So, this weekend I decided to have another go at the soup to school thing. I made this great Italian pasta and bean soup. 'Tis excellent. I can only hope it survives the chill and reanimation process.

However, in my quest for stupendous soup there were many things in need of chopping, such as onions, garlic, and pancetta (pancetta is ridiculously good stuff). It proved to be rather more difficult than it should have been because my knives are mind numbingly dull. Even after running them though my so-called "knife sharpener" they were dull. I have been saying the knives need to be professionally sharpened for months, but nothing has happened.

Also of note, as I was thumbing through my website statistics I ran into some keyword strings people had typed in to get to my website from search engines. Most of them were obscure, or put my website on the ten millionth page of results. However, one string, "emeril lagasse is annoying," on MSN search puts my Haute Hoopla page as the tenth result. Pretty crazy.

Many people - though - in my experience - mostly adults over thirty - seem to leap to the conclusion that if a driver makes a mistake, they are using their cell phone. It is possible the person who just made the mistake is driving and gabbing simultaneously. However, it is not fair to the other person to assume they made the mistake simply because they were talking on their cell phone. Maybe the person is tired. Perhaps they are having a bad day. For all one knows they made a genuine mistake.

So why are people breathing down the necks of these poor drivers who make small mistakes ? When I drive, I occasionally make minor mistakes, even though I am not using a cell phone. It would really irritate me if someone started screaming insults at me every time I made a mistake. People really need to calm down when they drive. Missing a green light is not the end of the world. At the most it might mean a fifteen second delay. Big deal.

Every Stop That Could Be Pulled Has Been
Everything, including the product literature, is simply superb at Design Within Reach. (Scan of pamphlet)

Weathering the superficial exteriors and silky smooth jazz playing on bushels of speakers lining the immaculate sidewalks was no easy feat. However, food was eventually found in the form of over-pepper-flaked pad thai. However, all of this adversity would be rewarded with hidden jungle treasure: the Design Within Reach store.

As with knitting, furniture is not usually my thing. For all I care about most furniture stores, the Pottery Barn could be a barn with pottery inside. Imagine that.

Design Within Reach is another story. Everything in that store is fantastic. From the comfy angular couches to the expertly designed product literature, every detail appears to be contemplated at length. Even the product placards were expertly designed. Each item was adorned by a simple white card displaying the price, description, the designer's name with black and white photo, no less. While I did not make any major furniture acquisitions, they did get me interested in some nifty cubitec shelving. Injection-molded polypropylene, three colors - what more could one ask for ?

In stark contrast to Design Within Reach there is the Container Store. Initially I had moderate to high hopes for the place. Everyone who had visited described it to me as an oasis of organization. Some reports indicate they had a band for their grand opening. A band! Of course, the Container Store would have been better suited to store real cargo containers holding things like hybrid cars, chocolate, or even those little umbrellas people put in drinks.

Nearly everything in that store was poorly designed and weird. Does anyone actually need styrofoam shelving? Absolutely not. What is the point of anti-wabble table and chair wedges? It would be easier (not to mention less lurid) to just fix the chair. Contain Yourself is a very appropriate slogan, catch phrase, et al. I had to work very hard to contain my ill thoughts of the store.

Come to think of it, this is just like the wonderful world of chocolate. A chocolate from Moonstruck Chocolate (wonderful little chocolate chain) tastes as good as it looks. Brand B's Big Brown Bar on the other hand, could use a little work.

On my latest driving escapade the radio was tuned to some station which was, at that point, airing an ad. It turned out to be for Microsoft Student Helper Plus Ultra 2005 (or something like that). Here's how the ad broke down:

Mom: You need to do your homework.
Kids: Okay, we will do it right now.
Boy Child: Hey dad, how do I solve y = x + z if y = x squared ?
Girl Child: What is the capitol of Bolivia ?
Boy Child: How do you conjugate this verb in Elbonian ?
Mom: Hey I know !
Dad: What ?
Mom: Let's use Microsoft Student Assistant Mega Plus 2005 Edition !
Kids: Wow, that is a great idea.
Announcer: Microsoft Student Assistant Mega Plus 2005 Edition is great if your kids go to school. It has a built in question answerer and graphing calculator, which will undoubtedly assist your child if they go to school. You can find it at all stores that sell it.

Okay, so I paraphrased a little bit (a lot), but the main thing I got in there was the bogus math problem. It is not possible to solve an equation of just variables. Well - that's not true - it is very solvable. There is an infinite number of solutions. But that's not what the ad seemed to indicate, unless the voice actor playing the boy child is really a bad actor.

While I have no idea how much education the person who wrote that ad had, it would be reasonable to asuume they went to college, since their ad was running on national radio. Bearing this in mind, it is very hard to believe such a blatant mistake would be made. This might have been marginally more acceptable if the ad was for Solanskee Surmoyski the Superb Psychic, but Microsoft sells software written by engineers, who hopefully know more than just simple algebra.

I guess this is just another reason I use a Mac.

The last teacher I would expect to hand out an abysmal assignment sheet would be an English teacher. They really ought to be good writers, as that is one of the core aspects of an English class' curriculum. However, the assignment sheet handed to me in the twilight of my Sophomore year is so awful I am having a hard time doing my homework.

Not only is the assignment poorly written, but the various activities from which students can choose vary greatly in difficulty and educational value. The assignments range from assembling a ten-song mix-CD, with explanations as to how each of the ten songs reflect an aspect of the book, to writing a minimum four page journal discussing various aspects of the book. While an equal amount of effort could theoretically be put into both of those assignments, one is inherently simpler and invites minimal effort.

Nonetheless, it is partly my fault I do not know what to do - I most certainly would have been able to ask questions for clarity had I foreseen these obstacles. Though, usually questions should not be, "What is the assignment exactly?" and more to the effect of, "Can I write my paper in pencil?"

When I read an article in The New York Times on Thursday I was skeptical as to whether people actually needed to see speech pathologists to have their voices changed. Surely, nobody's voice could be that bad. Of course, I made this assumption before I had stood in a line to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in IMAX.

One of the first things I notice about a person when I see them for the first time is the quality of their voice. It tells me a lot about the person. So, as I was standing in the queue, which would ultimately lead me into a room with eighty foot tall images of Johnny Depp's ghostly white face, I learned a lot about the other people in line, just by listening to the way they spoke.

Some of the voices I heard were so unpleasant I turned up my music so I did not have to listen to them. Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) also had a very odd voice indeed, though I suppose this was intentional. At any rate, I can now understand why some people would want their voices replaced. No offense to those people, but their voices are just unpleasant.

Also of note, watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on a huge screen is somewhat scary. You can see every little pore on every actor's face.

At the moment I do not have time to write an entire and detailed account of the situation surrounding my painful experience with driver's education. I just thought I should say that it is very panful. It has also made it virtually impossible for me to do anything I enjoy. Additionally, I have not been able to get my t-shirts online because of the class.

I find it amazing that you get discounts for taking this class.

The other day I decided I wanted a bright blue bowler hat. Of course, one would think, with Google and the internet you could find such a hat in a heartbeat. This, however, is not the case. The first thing I tried were all of my shopping bookmarks. Urban Outfitters had nothing of the sort; mostly those baseball caps. Realizing that I was looking for a bowler hat, I stepped up the class a couple notches, as the great Lagasse might say. Nordstrom had nothing. Saks Fifth Avenue doesn't even sell hats. Neiman Marcus had hats, but they were mostly these $500 Prada hats for women. They were also kind of ugly.

Then I tried Google. I got lots of party sites that were selling these cheap looking $5 hats. No can do for me. I want something that's sturdy. So I'm continuing my search, but at the same time, I am very upset at how hard it is to happen upon a hat.