The actual good version of the speech I've mangled above does really include the line "Why does Rice play Texas?" John Kennedy said that while standing in the middle of Rice's football field, a field that had at the time just been used to host the Super Bowl. That was not why he gave his speech there. He gave his speech there because Rice had just donated a large amount of land to the administration so they could build a space center. In exchange Kennedy spoke there and the government built Rice three new science buildings, one of which was dedicated to astronomy and astrophysics.

I came to Rice 35 years after that speech, after everyone had forgotten that it was given there, after the notion of having an astrophysics department required some kind of explanation, and after it was no longer obvious to anybody why a very small, non-sports-loving university like us would have such a mammoth stadium. It's amazing how quickly things like that get forgotten. As I write this I realize that the babies born on September 12 2001 have already learned how to talk and will be headed off to preschool soon. Good luck babies! Let's hope some other things are forgotten by the time you're heading off to college and that the speeches given long ago at your stadia celebrated exploration and discovery and assuaged fear in dangerous times.

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My brain. It is out of gas. I have been working flat-out for weeks and I finally (a) assembled a real master's thesis committee and (b) gave them all a draft of my paper. Now that it's one whole document rather than a loose collection of scattered thoughts, I'm finding flaws in it all over the place. Good enough for a master's thesis — it turns out that they don't actually have to be that good, nobody is really going to read them anyway — but I am hoping to get some bigger things out of it than that. Because as long as I'm committed to playing the academia game I want to level up, dammit. I need at least another point in Lightning Blast before I can beat the Thesis Committee Chair at the end of Level 12.

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LaTeX. I hate it.

No, wait! LaTeX, baby, I didn't mean it! Please typeset my paper! You know I don't really care about all those other typesetting systems, baby. Now put the gun down and tell me why this macro doesn't work.

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So I've had this MP3 player for weeks and months, but for the longest time I just copied CDs onto it and listened to them sequentially. Last night I finally decided to give Ye Olde Shuffle Mode a try, and let me tell you: it was fun. I stayed up way past my bedtime listening to see what would come up with next. I swear, they build shuffle modes these days that actually know which songs are good. I have, like, metric gigabytes of crap on there, but it only played stuff I am into but hadn't listened to in a while. You rule, iRiver!

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Gah. Just because I've given my paper to a committee doesn't mean I don't still have tons to do on it. For one thing, I've got to prepare slides for my thesis defense. For another, I've got to clean up The Appendix That Ate Manhattan, a 20-page code chunk that I only include at my advisor's insistence. Alas, LaTeX's passive-aggressive way of dealing with lines that are too long in code is just to put them in anyway, jutting way out off into neverland. It prints out a warning message, but it prints out so much crap that it's pretty difficult to train yourself not to just ignore it.

No! Wait! LaTeX, baby, I didn't mean it! I love you! Don't mysteriously stop working on me!