nawl

So I was at the library today looking for books for my French paper. There are a lot of books in our library. Like 8 million. I checked out books that haven't been checked out in a decade, and even some guy's 600-page doctoral thesis which was printed, of course, by "Thèse à la carte".

Some gems I found (but was not inspired to check out):

Etude morphosyntaxique du mot où by Pascale Hadermann, 307 pages
De l'emploi du subjonctif passé Eva Hau, 240 pages

Is this what academia leads people to?

Other books with interesting titles:

Des mots sans-culottes Henriette Walter
Je parle plus mieux francaise que vous et j'te merde (ou les joies de la francacophonie) Alain Stanké

Posted by nadia at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today while a bunch of us were coming back from Cheeseboard around lunchtime, we noticed a caravan of SUVs with a police escort stop in front of Chez Panisse. Six handsome young men in suits with earpieces got out, two went inside, the rest stood around and looked official. The SUVs didn't seem to have anyone else in them, so we figured whoever famous it was for must be coming later.

One of the bodyguards standing outside told us that it was for the Secretary of Energy.

Now.

I have no idea who our Secretary of Energy is. Is that much security really standard practice for a politician that nobody would recognize? Or did the bodyguard lie so we wouldn't be interested?

Posted by nadia at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cool noodles appear like many transparent crystal bridges.
They are so slippery that they slide down into the stomach,
"Oh!" I can not help having a hiccup.

--Chen Horng Serves the Table

Posted by nadia at 05:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is an awesome idea: The Evans Hall Coloring Contest. The site is unfortunate, but the contest idea itself is hilarious. There are flyers advertising it all over Evans.

Probably only funny if you understand French: Jean-Claude van Damme est aware

Posted by nadia at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week's culinary creation. They took at least 6 hours of work, spanning the past 36 hours or so. Phew.

Posted by nadia at 11:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My new fallback post.

Last night several of us from the house went up on the roof to watch the meteors. Neat way to lose sleep, definitely.

I am now in the process of making croissants, the 12-hour Julia Child way. Photos to come if they don't look like little charcoals when I'm done. Anyone in Berkeley is welcome to come by Wednesday evening for a few.

Posted by nadia at 07:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"The sun is setting!" Probably Scott or Hunter. So you run upstairs, scramble through the fourth floor window onto the roof, and as you walk forward the buildings fall away, and you're surrounded by hills on one side, the bay on the other, trees in between, and the sky is lit up in all sorts of ridiculous colors.

It's become a daily thing. This was Thursday's.

Wednesday's light was rather interesting too. 5 minutes later the sky was entirely pink, but I was already running to make it to a review session.

Posted by nadia at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our room is entirely covered in plants.

It'll be cleaned up soon, but for now it adds a kind of neat jungly feel. That was the point, after all.

Office-chair roller polo. Or something. At one point I came downstairs and saw a bunch of guys riding office chairs around our mostly empty living room and whacking each other with water noodles and bouncy balls and whatever else we had. I think they were mostly from Cloyne.

And a jam session. The theme of one of the rooms. Four guitars, three bongo drums, a trumpet, a synthesizer, and whoever felt like singing at the moment. I stayed there for a while. One of the most musically coherent (and disgusting) songs was the "white-trash necrophiliac blues".

Posted by nadia at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Castro district, San Francisco. Gigantic Halloween street party, for those who aren't familiar with the area.

Here's a slightly blurry picture near the center of the insanity (you can see the gigantic rainbow flag in the center if you look closely). People as far as the eye can see...

Last year I went with Juliana, who wore practically nothing and attracted quite a lot of attention in our direction. This time I felt like I did a lot more observing and a lot less of being observed. Although I did get my cleavage patted by a random woman in a tiger suit.

Some people have really elaborate costumes and spent all their time being photographed.

A very lovely man:

One of at least two peacock ladies I saw. This one said she spent two weeks making her costume:

I'm not exactly sure what this person was, but it was very large and looked to be made entirely of plastic:

I thought these protesters were great. They were marching all around Market between Civic Center and Castro. Since you can't see their signs all that clearly, I'll transcribe them: "Peace is for pussy's" "Fuck the Poor!" "More guns 4 the children" "Herpes rule!" "Fuck peace" etc...

On our way back to the bart station, we passed a group of 20 or 30 people who had a very large sign that said "YES! (on prop. such-and-such)" and were just chanting "yes! yes! yes!" while pounding their fists in the air. It was amusing at the time.

Some guys dressed as, well, feminine products. The o.b. guy's box says, among other things "obehave" and "obi-wan kenobi, you're my only hope". The Vagisil box says "Cleanses away fish odor. Needs no water or gargling."

I saw at least 3 or 4 Waldos in the crowd, and every one was constantly hounded by people: "Hey Waldo, I found you!" "Waldo, where ya been?!" etc.

The ride back on Bart was *not* fun -- similar, I'm told, to an average day on the Tokyo subway, but maybe with more oddly dressed people. Then again, maybe not.

Everyone who was officially employed that evening for city things had to have a sense of humor. And for the most part, they seemed to. Police officers were cheerfully dumping drinks out onto the ground, Bart guards let hundreds of people through the gates without paying, etc... and dealt with the thousands of drunken revelers in an overall very nice manner.

Posted by nadia at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)