Okay, I finished my essay. The Freudian uncanniness needs to stop. But no, now Hugh emails me with the fb profile of a girl in SY'11 who does indeed look uncannily like me. I guess the effects will take a while to wear off.

An hour of ring time at Harkness and white shrimp pie at Pepe's. Life is gooooooood.

First, Bobby and I chat for an hour in Dutch at Java's without any idea of how strange we must have seemed. Next, I find that Yale Educational Travel is hosting a Waterways of Holland and Belgium trip, and the Little Theatre is showing In Bruges. Today I manage to memorize Geert's organ piece in a single day. What's next, Low Countries?

Now I can finally make up for the fact that I never took a polisci course at Yale: Open Yale courses online. Sweet.

bayer's cashing in + a new idol

"Bayer HealthCare...announced its decision to leave the New Haven area in November and put the site up for auction. Mark C. Bennett, a Bayer spokesman, said there were 17 bidders...a Yale official confirmed an Associated Press report that the price would be about $100 million. Dr. Levin said that money was not a problem and that Yale would pay cash."

The Rochester Museum of Science had an exhibit about money that showed the volume occupied by $1,000 or some such amount of one-dollar bills. I'm envisioning freight trucks of cash-filled suitcases pulling up in front o Bayer's headquarters in Germany.

Also... some clever words from an open letter to a Senator the writer once knew well: We have seen more people die last year from spinach then pot.

Finally... I WANT THIS MAN'S LIFE. I can't believe I'd never heard of photographer Edward Burtynsky before. How does he track down such extraordinarily haunting scenes of the industrial waste of the world? Perhaps they're not so difficult to find. Perhaps they're everywhere -- everywhere that we don't look.


A documentary featuring his work, "Manufactured Landscapes," seems a likely candidate for my favorite film since Koyaanisqaatsi. I've been so out of it. If only my usual life gave me the spare time to chance upon things like this more often.

the rube goldberg tax refund, aka pleasure beach revisited

How does it take 32 steps (some involving entire forms of calculations), 4 supplemental forms, and a total of 6 pages of paper probably harvested from old growth forests in order to calculate that I made only $840 as a part-time resident of Connecticut, owe a grand total of $0 in taxes to the state, and want my measly $42 refund donated the Endangered Species, Natural Area Preserves, and Watchable Wildlife Fund?

The operations involved in turning $840 into $840 and $0 into $0 in a dozen steps were, at least, entertaining in retrospect.

The whole thing was clearly meant to be, however. Certain I had missed the deadline, I checked the Connecticut Department of Revenue Services website yesterday to discover that the filing deadline had been extended to today owing to "the storm that caused flooding and the power outages throughout the state." Hmph, news to me. Anyway, not wanting my withheld taxes to go to the government's slush fund (where it would probably, as Paul quipped, have been used for the abolishment of the CT Department of Environmental Protection), I frantically filled out the flurry of paperwork between juries. I knew immediately amongst the charities that I wanted to support this one because I remember vividly where that department is lacking: Visions of wandering through a foresaken wildlife refuge and beach town near New Haven will always haunt me. So beautiful, so eerie, so sad.

TAKE THAT HAHVAHD!

Finally: proof that Harvard Sucks Royally. As in, this is the first time I've seen Yale win The Game!!! YEEEEEHAW!!! Better extremely late than never. And to be honest, I wasn't even watching the game, nor did I see Yale win it. But I was sitting in a booth in the Distillery with the combined Yale and Harvard alumni clubs (the one Cantab I met was rather quieter than the Yalies from the start) listening in awe to a fellow by the name of Mr. Rusling (PC '63), whom I fully intend to nominate as the BUTANE patron saint. What prankstering this native Rochesterian accomplished in college. Gutsy prankstering. On the level of taking the lights out over all of central campus on May Day. And employing materials of every type, from countless explosives to ten-foot bamboo poles. I regaled him with a few of our comparable hacks, but was quite content to sit back and listen to how the Alley Cats were as infamous (and arrestable) as they were famous in the days that he was pitch for them. Neither the Pundits (who may well be the originators of that eponymous word) nor the Men of JE could claim such notoriety. And would you know, his office is a stone's throw from me. A cherry bomb's throw, really.

Ended up practicing nearly four hours of carillon after winding my way underground into Spurrier, since the front doors had been left locked. Emerged with wrecked hands, a back all tied up in knots again, to find the winter evening and dinnertime already descended. At least the weather's still bike-worthy.