what, because i said "sure, i don't see why not"?

You're darkness! You are about the most evil thing on this planet...who knows if you are sane or not but one thing is for sure, you're not a people person. You're more bent on destoying mankind, when it comes right down to it.


What element are you?

i took the quiz as an apology to sithdragn for posting the adopt-a-draggy below, but i think it's broken ...

my second result, incidentally, if i went the other way on questions where i was on the fence, was


You're wind! You are a very kind and sympathetic person. Whoever DOESN'T like you has a mental disorder, because you are a loving and caring gentle soul.


hmm. wind and darkness, eh? i believe that was morgana le fay ...

progress report

page count: 7
page goal: at least 20
hours until due: 35
pages per hour if i go straight through without interruptions like sleeping or taking written finals: .5714285714285714285...
plans between now and deadline: sleep, take written final

edited to add:
... and other reasons fox doesn't take math classes any more. (you may be interested to note that the first value for "pages per hour," caught before i posted, looked at "20 pages" and then at "35 hours" and calculated how many pages per hour i'd have to do if i needed to write 35 pages in 20 hours. the current figure, of course, ignores the fact that 7 -- by now, actually, 8.5 -- pages of the thing have already been written.)

revised pages per hour if i go straight through, etc.: .3285714285714285714...

and i get to use my new icon

... she said, grimly.

JCPenney is selling this product just in time for Christmas.

Following is the note I just sent them -- I selected "Contact Us" at the JCPenney website, and clicked through customer service through "e-mail us" to "products" and then "toys." The product number, which the form asks you for, is IH655-0158A.

---
You can't be serious.

Kids are going to play soldiers, okay, even if there's not a war on. Toy soldiers, and toy tanks and helicopters, and toy bunkers, and even toy guns, I'm okay with. But toy shelled-out homes? For ages five and up?! I mean, does it come with little toy bodies of the people who lived there before the Marines arrived? Or is there a toy refugee camp somewhere else in your catalog with those figures in it?

I urge you to reconsider offering this product for sale, and I'm sure countless other consumers will agree with me. You may contact me at the above e-mail address.

Yours sincerely,
etc.
-----

there's something bizarre

about taking a final exam with a dictionary at your elbow.

this course had bi-weekly quizzes. the format was always the same: four or five questions, each of which included a short passage from something we'd been reading in class, which we were to translate (and he'd give us a short wordlist so we didn't get hung up on deceptive cognates, etc.), and two words for which we were to identify some feature -- the gender, case, number, person, mood, tense, or whatever.

the final was just like the quizzes, only longer.

thing being, the glossary has, for each word, the definition and the gender, case, number, person, mood, tense, or whatever right there! so, like, sure, we could only use the glossary and not flip back through the book to look up footnotes and pronoun tables and whatnot, but who needed the rest of the book? not sure if something's dative or accusative? think it matters? look in the glossary -- those were the professor's instructions!

i confess myself a bit baffled. (not arguing, mind you, but baffled nonetheless.)

i suppose the fact that we've been doing this all semester did make it easier for us than it would have made some random person off the street armed with the same glossary, because the glossary didn't say anything about sentence patterns and idioms and stuff -- so once i'd pulled the word-by-word translation out of the glossary, i was able to make it into decent-sounding modern english sentences, which was what he was testing.

fair enough. not thinking about it any more now, that's for sure. two down, one to go -- i'm going to catch a quick nap, then bang out the rest of this paper and wonder why the hell le boy hasn't gotten back to me yet. (even if he says no thanks, he still has my dictionary. grr.)

side benefits

i do love going through a paper, realizing i need to divide a paragraph, hitting Return for the graf break, and getting another page break out of it. this must be a leftover feeling from high school. :-)

holy mackerel

why didn't somebody tell me what was going on with trent lott? i'm buried in books over here and not watching the news, but this is top-notch entertainment, here, watching the guy back-pedal and try not to implode.