Random Stuff VIII
If you're ever starving in downtown Las Vegas, I highly recommend the the buffet at Main Street Station. Whether it's the best of the downtown buffets is a matter of conjecture; but it certainly has the greatest repertoire. Its salad bar is so varied that it offers both pasta salad and antipasta salad. Doesn't that sound kind of dangerous? You'd want to keep them well apart, preferably separated by vacuum. While my mind was wandering I made the foolish mistake of piling both onto the same plate. The resulting explosion flattened half of downtown Las Vegas.
You'd think I'd learn from such an experience. But the very next day I had Orange Roughy for dinner...and for dessert, an Orange Smoothie. Foom! There went the other half of downtown Vegas.
Now that I have finally acquired license plates for my new car, I am pleased to announce that the Handy Rotating Mobile Library Service is back! In addition to my license plate itself, the HRMLS Starter Kit comprises the following stickers:
I'm still learning how to write, and probably will be for the rest of my life. That's how this journal got started, and is a major reason why I still force myself to grind out a couple thousand words every weekend when, occasionally, I'd much rather be deriving likelihood-ratio tests for pairs of relatives in a population with significant loss of heterozygosity due to genetic drift among subpopulations. (More importantly, I look forward to the comments from my good LJ friends.)
While I was attending college at Oberlin, it had the best liberal-arts English department in the country. I learned more about writing during one semester of English at Oberlin than I did in twelve years of public school in Utah. (Okay, that may have been the result of bad teachers over a critical two-year period-my junior and senior high-school years-and not the fault of the public education system itself. After all, my calculus teacher in high school was as skilled at teaching as the mathematics faculty at Oberlin were.) However, this is not to say that the mere presence of a powerhouse English department granted all Oberlin students with the gift of immaculate and powerful prose-or even adequate, intelligible prose.
Specifically, I recall one afternoon of writing medical-school application letters at the computer center in the basement of Mudd Library. The fellow sitting next to me was writing a paper for an English class. After two solid hours of careful, fingernail-biting cogitation, he had produced exactly one sentence, recreated here for your amusement with all grammatical errors preserved:
Where as the previous songs gave it's message while bringing the climaxing cruelties of the character's actions to a more thought provoking state, the next song, "Little Women" has a message about how women were treated that is thought provoking and shocking.
It made such an impression on me that I can still reproduce the passage from memory, nearly 20 years later. What amazed me that most was the sheer intensity of thought that went into this sentence. He really tried hard to come up with that. A phenomenal quantity of effort was invested in each word, and more still into the placement of each word.
This was back before most people had even heard of learning disabilities. But I think that the deficit here occurs on a higher organizational level than the specific problems caused by dyslexia or speech-sound disorder. Has the condition of "writing like a sullen teenager on LiveJournal" been assigned a clinical designation yet? I'm sure it'll appear in the next revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for psychiatric disorders.
You'd think I'd learn from such an experience. But the very next day I had Orange Roughy for dinner...and for dessert, an Orange Smoothie. Foom! There went the other half of downtown Vegas.
Now that I have finally acquired license plates for my new car, I am pleased to announce that the Handy Rotating Mobile Library Service is back! In addition to my license plate itself, the HRMLS Starter Kit comprises the following stickers:
- What Our Schools Need Is a Moment of SCIENCE
- Support Our Troops-Bring Them Home
- Since When Did Unquestioning Obedience to Corporate Interests Become Patriotic?
I'm still learning how to write, and probably will be for the rest of my life. That's how this journal got started, and is a major reason why I still force myself to grind out a couple thousand words every weekend when, occasionally, I'd much rather be deriving likelihood-ratio tests for pairs of relatives in a population with significant loss of heterozygosity due to genetic drift among subpopulations. (More importantly, I look forward to the comments from my good LJ friends.)
While I was attending college at Oberlin, it had the best liberal-arts English department in the country. I learned more about writing during one semester of English at Oberlin than I did in twelve years of public school in Utah. (Okay, that may have been the result of bad teachers over a critical two-year period-my junior and senior high-school years-and not the fault of the public education system itself. After all, my calculus teacher in high school was as skilled at teaching as the mathematics faculty at Oberlin were.) However, this is not to say that the mere presence of a powerhouse English department granted all Oberlin students with the gift of immaculate and powerful prose-or even adequate, intelligible prose.
Specifically, I recall one afternoon of writing medical-school application letters at the computer center in the basement of Mudd Library. The fellow sitting next to me was writing a paper for an English class. After two solid hours of careful, fingernail-biting cogitation, he had produced exactly one sentence, recreated here for your amusement with all grammatical errors preserved:
Where as the previous songs gave it's message while bringing the climaxing cruelties of the character's actions to a more thought provoking state, the next song, "Little Women" has a message about how women were treated that is thought provoking and shocking.
It made such an impression on me that I can still reproduce the passage from memory, nearly 20 years later. What amazed me that most was the sheer intensity of thought that went into this sentence. He really tried hard to come up with that. A phenomenal quantity of effort was invested in each word, and more still into the placement of each word.
This was back before most people had even heard of learning disabilities. But I think that the deficit here occurs on a higher organizational level than the specific problems caused by dyslexia or speech-sound disorder. Has the condition of "writing like a sullen teenager on LiveJournal" been assigned a clinical designation yet? I'm sure it'll appear in the next revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for psychiatric disorders.