Update: Jellybean Menace, Really Big Antlers

K reported a second linear candy trail sighting, also on Garden Street: skittles this time.

I was away in Houston for LPSC, and it seems to have rained the whole week in Boston. I returned last night. This afternoon on the walk home, I saw the now-familiar jellybeans still on the sidewalk, swept to the side and bleached white by rain, like ET. Little ET jellybeans. I wondered if they were still delicious.

Also, Tycho Brahe lost part of his nose in a duel. He lived the rest of his life with a prosthetic nose made of precious metals. He also had a dwarf and a domesticated elk in his court, but the elk drank too much beer one day, fell down some stairs and died. It is sad, but this is what makes the history of science worth reading about.

The moral of the story is, keep your domesticated elk out of the cask ale.

This image is on my blog...

...for March Madness bracket purposes. They needed an active link.

Look up "Engelbert Humperdinck"

As I was walking home last night, I noticed a yellow jellybean on the sidewalk. An orange one. Some reds. A trail of jellybeans, strewn along, some stuck in the gaps between brick cobbles. All on my path to home.

I grew suspicious. What if I were walking into a trap!? I felt helpless. Sensible alternate routes were not available: I was nearly home. The rest of the walk was jarring, especially since I knew not to follow candy trails anywhere. This brought up some thoughts:

1) Why a trail, and not, say, an explosion of jellybeans? Assuming a stationary point source, one would expect roughly radial candy-spatter. Perhaps not stationary. Perhaps a jogger, eating jellybeans. This would be most unwise. Subsequent loss of jellybeans would illustrate that one ought not eat while jogging: caution, choking hazard; tragic loss of jellybeans may also occur.

2) It is also possible that the beans were dropped from a stationary source and were subsequently dispersed along the sidewalk by oblivious pedestrians. I would not kick those jellybeans, myself. I would not touch them with a 10 foot pole. *

I am not writing from the basement terrarium of a somerville madman / cat lady, so rest assured that I did not fall into a trap.

* * *

The anecdote brings me to my larger point. I am certain that whoever dropped the jellybeans did not intend to alarm anyone (and, I'll admit, was probably not setting a trap). The circumstance of the jellybeans being on the ground was not significant. The hard cold fact of my fairytale-related paranoia was likewise generally insignificant. But in each other's presence they had life; resonance pushed the system into something altogether unintended. This got me thinking about things that were unintended, but happened anyway.

I did not intend to drive myself crazy with work this semester, but this somehow happened anyway. Again, I propose that this has to do with a superposition of signals: academic circumstance, overly ambitious advisors and my own intrinsic idiocy. What was I thinking? I had a moment last Thursday where I was struck with the silliness of it all: were we really discussing what shape magma lenses might take under mid-ocean ridges? Wouldn't we all be better off learning a trade? The world might thank us to stop being so useless. But then someone said something crazy about helium isotopes, and I was brought back to my old self again. I've decided this episode was a symptom of topical boredom rather than actual crisis of purpose. But still, I need a break.

I did not intend to neglect friends, but this happened anyway. This has to do with the paragraph above. I do not know where January went, or February for that matter. Is it March? Good lord. I'll see you in May, I hope.

This is taking the tone of an apology. I feel guilty. This might have to do with a dream I had last night, in which I did several naughty things for which I should feel guilty, all of which were strange and involved people I know. This must be it. Dear great void: the dream was unintended, and happened anyway. Truly sorry. Moving on.

I'm sure that this is probably not it, but that will have to do for tonight on the vague-persistent-unease front. I'll think about it and get back to the void.

Hope you are all well,
R


* May seem extreme, but I associate stray sweets with the candied house with sugar windows where Hansel und Gretel were trapped, and Hansel nearly eaten, be he fat or lean. Menacing. I paid attention as a child.

Valentine's Day Cookie and Albuterol Cocktail

A return to curiosities:

1. Cake + cookie = ? Around Valentine's Day at Shaw's I found a heart-shaped chocolate cake covered with white frosting, a blue-frosting cookie monster AND A COOKIE ON TOP. This was ground-breaking, to me. I've had cake with cookies, cookie cake, severely frosted cookie cake, and even cookie cupcake (aka Lump of cookie). It had never occurred to me to put cookies on top of cake. This marvelous invention was my Valentine's Day present to 81 Huron, and it equaled delicious.

2. Living out nerd paradigm This week the stars conspired against (?) me: I had two diff eq math projects due in a span of two days, and then my docs put me on an inhaler because I couldn't breathe. Given my post-flu mental and physical haze, it was all I could do to keep track of the derivatives of Bessel functions and the number of species in a given fauna at time T, and -- brace for the nerd statement of the year -- I lost my inhaler. On some level, I felt that this established additional nerd cred that in regular circumstances would have been beyond my reach, because really, I am a field hockey-playing science nerd, and there is just something extra special about asthmatic mathematicians. +5 points

We end with an Amy Adams quote from Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

You need to go out there, and you need to rev your engine, you need to fire it up. You need to grab a hold of that line between speed and chaos, and you need to wrestle it to the ground like a demon cobra, and then, when the fear rises up in your belly, you use it. And you know that fear is powerful, because it has been there for billions of years, and it is good. And you use it. And you ride it; you ride it like a skeleton horse through the gates of hell, and then you win, Ricky. You win! And you don't win for anybody else. You win for you, you know why? Because a man takes what he wants. He takes it all. And you're a man, aren't you? Aren't you?

This ranks up there with Theoden's inspirational speech to the Riders of Rohan, in my reckoning.

Posts will be sparse this semester, a warning.