Assorted Thoughts 27: Sadly I Cannot Make Odd Noises In Text Form

• My style of online gaming is such that I find it is just as easy to respawn as it is to reload.
• Grading speed runs: great for my desire to do other things, great for my students' GPA, bad for my conscience.
• At this stage in my life, I own two near-identical Red Sox caps.  One is nice and new, and reserved for formal occasions, such as baseball games.  The other is grungy and beat-up and used for everything else, like fieldwork, yardwork, and days I can't be bothered trying to contain my hair's anger.
• Until my nearly-new phone decided that a usable 7 key was for the weak, I really hadn't thought about how difficult it is to compose text messages that avoid the letters p, q, r, and s.  Is the answer "circuitous sentence structure"?  Turns out you can't say that either.
• The dead key has made me very glad I have at least a reasonable fluency in 1337.  Or 133t, because that damn key doesn't work.
• It's surprisingly awkward trying to figure out what to do when walking towards a sporting event, while still outside the stadium, and the national anthem is playing.
• After a recent experience at a Target with plenty of howling little monsters, I propose that a group of young children be referred to as an "infestation."  Aren't collective nouns fun?
• While talking to my advisor today, he told me that he was impressed by my willingness to admit that I'd screwed up.  I don't expect anyone who knows me personally to believe this anecdote.

Assorted Thoughts 26: This Counts As A Title, I Swear

• I went to one of my school's club hockey team's games a week or two ago.  After a furious comeback, they won in overtime.  The crowd went crazy cheering, and then one voice yelled, "We won!  LET'S GET WASTED!"
• Apparently someone found this place using the search keyword "rubber mouth."  I'm not sure how I feel about that.
• Hypothesis: if having parents that are DEEEEAAAAAD makes children become vigilantes, then children whose parents are brutally murdered before their very eyes will be significantly more likely to become Batman than children whose parents survive, or die out of sight.
• How many butts could a what butt butt if a what what in the butt?
• Does anyone else feel mildly disconcerted when you have a question about something and can't think of a way to phrase a Google search to find an answer?
• I have to think for a moment when someone asks me how old I am.  That seems like a bad thing.
• I got into the lab earlier than normal recently, before anyone else was in.  That meant I had to get the coffee going, and experienced firsthand the "I need coffee so I can remember how to make the coffee" paradox.  I'm turning into my dad.  Not cool.
• Lessons learned from "The Wizard of Oz": Intercontinental ballistic houses will ruin your whole day, and it's impossible for a lecturer to try to use the movie as an example in class without coming off as a weirdo.
• If I can add a little confusion to the world each day, I think I can be content with my life.
• I really think that all high-class, snooty rich person-targeted ski resorts should be required by law to have at least one yeti for every three ski runs.  It'd cut down on the population of idiots who don't know how to ski and go simply to show off their stylish gear, and really, who wouldn't want to read a news article about some reality show "star" going missing and turning up in fragmentary form in a wampa cave?

What I Have Learned So Far As A Teaching Assistant

I am about one and a third weeks into my teaching assistantship trying to convince people that biology is interesting.  The sad part is that it's nominally a lab for the intro bio course for majors, so one would expect they're interested by default.  That, alas, would be an inaccurate assumption.  A few things I have discovered thus far:

• Assume you are teaching cabbages.  Rowdy, disobedient cabbages.
• Prior knowledge is probably not something you can depend on.  Hint: red blood cells do not attack antibodies.
• Don't show fear.  Undergraduates can sense fear.
• There is always an excuse.
• No matter how explicit you make it, it will be misunderstood or ignored.  For example, large italics saying "COMPLETE SENTENCES" on a slide will not make people realize they have to use complete sentences.
• Don't be afraid to say you don't know.  As in, "I don't know why I gave you a zero.  Can you please put the gun down?"
• When grading, treat misspellings as an adventure.  It's apparently possible to spell "rotten" with a "w."  I had no idea.
• Students write simply to get it over with.  Legibility, space on the page, or any semblance of sense are all secondary to the goal of putting things that might be letters together in assemblages that might be words in sequences that might be phrases that could, if you squint just right during a specific phase of the moon on the fifth Tuesday of the month, almost answer the assigned question.  Maybe.
• Being a good TA is a lot like being a good umpire.  You have to have a thick skin and very, very selective hearing.
• Pretty soon, you're just as eager as your little monsters are to get the hell out of the lab and be done for the afternoon.

I'm adding this last one well after initial publication, but that's because I ran across something way too hilariously depressing to not mention.

•  This one is filed under the "I don't want to live on the same planet as you anymore" heading.  To recap, I am teaching the labs for an intro bio for majors course.  I got to listen to one of my students complain to me about how the professor teaches the course as if the students are bio majors.  Apparently, it's easier for a non-major to gripe about the class being taught for the people the course listing says it's aimed at than it is to, say, register for a course aimed at all the business majors or aspiring Great American Novelists who will actually end up grinding out twice-weekly columns about local minor-league playhouses and their exciting upcoming production of Macbeth as told by Mrs. Smith's fourth grade class.

Now if you don't mind, I have some grading to do, followed by a play date on the nearest railroad crossing.

Assorted Thoughts 25: Howling Like A Monkey With Its Tail Caught In A Vise Edition

• One of the stores in the University Center here on campus sells school-branded bottle opener keychains.  Know your clientele, I guess.
• Listening to "American Idiot" is a great way to prep for some grading.
• I like the lab I'm working in.  I like it especially because of the Neverending Coffeepot.  Caffeine must flow.
• I also keep the fridge stocked with Mountain Dew.  You know, just in case.
• Reminder to self: when going to Target, do try not to wear red shirts and tan shorts or pants.  It's quite possible for strange ladies to mistake you for a Target employee despite the large "RED SOX" written across your chest.
• Ron Paul: the Creature from the Atlas Shrugged Lagoon.
• Brigham Young University's mascot is the cougar, which has unpleasant secondary meanings. Mormons are also legendarily fecund. Therefore, I think I'm going to start calling BYU's teams the MILFs.
• I think I don't have existential doubt so much as existential sulk.
• This is a paragraph from a paper on octopuses I read recently:
• 

"Unusual behavior by the female was noted after one copulation. Five minutes after the termination of mating the female inhaled, raised her mantle straight up for five to eight seconds, then exhaled forcibly while lowering the mantle to its normal position. Two minutes later, while sitting in the head-high position, she furiously curled her her wriggling arms back and forth over the mantle for 30 secs and then continued this behavior every four minutes. In the interim she would place from one to three arms into her mantle cavity for approximately 20 secs then suddenly withdraw them with a contraction of the mantle. This behavior continued for seven hours and the ventilation rate remained high, from 38 to 42/min. Thereafter, her behavior was completely normal. This behavior remains enigmatic."
• 

I think that's a scientific description of an octopus rape victim.

Assorted Thoughts 24: Posts! Posts Everywhere! Or At Least Right Here.

• Left 4 Dead has definitely made too large of an impression on me.  Any time I enter a mall now, I feel naked without automatic weapons, shrieking babies sound uncannily like Hunters, and I'm always surprised at the lack of weapons caches and pipe bombs.
• It makes me happy that there is a scholarly journal entitled "Harmful Algae."  Research will be done on everything we can find and written up in increasingly obscure publications that are absurdly specific!
• Wondering how to make plants exciting?  Offer a class called "Plants of the Bible and Quran."  Clearly.  Goddamn botanists.
• Fun fact: Taco Bell "Fire Sauce" lists soy sauce as one of its ingredients.  Not making this up.  None of their other sauces contain it, though they all have soy in some form.
• I feel I have a right to complain about the local humidity when I step out of a building and my glasses fog up.
• Superheroes do it with masks on.
• Also, with spandex.  Just pointed out to me.
• Amusing rhyming phrase of the day: harpoon a baboon.

Assorted Thoughts 23: Resumption of Attempted Funny Edition

• I would like to judge a wet manatee shirt contest.
• Does it strike anyone else as ironic that there's a country singer whose last name is Urban?
• I've spent so much time packing things into cars lately that I start humming the Tetris theme any time I have to put stuff away.
• It gets a lot easier to listen to the nonsense the Republicans are spouting if you just treat it as if they were from an alternate history novel.
• I realized I needed to work on cleaning up my language when I noticed that I swore more like an old sailor than did the actual old sailors I worked with.
• A round of Angry Birds is like a rousing game of 9/11.
• I think I'm nostalgic for the future.  At least in the sense of feeling a longing for the past when the future was a bright, shiny place full of appliances to make life easier and space stations and exploration of the unknown, not a grim place filled with tyrannical governments, malevolent AIs, and terrorists trying to kill everything that ever was.
• Betting odds on the genre of the future:
• Tom Swift 1,000,000,000:1
• Star Trek 100,000,000:1
• Deus Ex 3:1
• Blade Runner 2:1
• Cockroach Paradise 1:1
• Well, shit.
• Flipping through channels late at night recently, I came across a show entitled "Fitness Beauties."  The only description on the channel guide info page?  "Footage of women working out."  Full stop, end of story.  How, uh, intriguing.  The next show in line on whatever godsforsaken channel that was: "Bikini All-Stars."  Classy.
• Restaurant name idea: The Panicking Crab.  Seafood, naturally.