What plague do you wish on your enemies?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question. As we near the end of the semester, I am asking the truly deep and personality-revealing questions:

What plague do you wish on your enemies?

Traditionalists:

• darkness
• bubonic plague
• bugs (pun intended)
• boils!!
• locust swarm
• black (bubonic) plague

Tradition with a bit of a twist:

• really cuddly locusts
• flaming dog rain
• hairless cats
• bees?

Dark or too honest:

• endless Mondays & cumulative finals
• long Sharples lines
• my life
• misery
• life
• perspective
• classes where you learn nothing & never get any grades back

Not really feeling malicious today:

• teddy bears
• plague them with love
• none
• happy and healthy lives
• pass
• N/A
• no plagues

Earnest and unsortable plagues:

• having to deal with people like them
• P=NP nightmares
• man-eating snowmen
• piece of hair always stuck in mouth
• very droppy icicles form around them and often lightly stab them
• eternally dry eyes
• your face turns into a plague doctor mask with the beaks and stuff
• a case of mitosis, aggressive osmosis

I am fond of "piece of hair always stuck in mouth" as a low-level continual irritation which is not directly harmful, but definitely the sort of thing to wish on an enemy. The icicles also earns points for convoluted (preplanned?!) detail. However, the winner must be "eternal ear wax" which is something we all have, but I guess as a plague it would be unusually bountiful?

This post's theme word is vouchsafe (v. tr.) "to grant or give something as if as a favor" or (v. intr.) "to condescend." I vouchsafed to post the homework several days early, to raucous applause.

What is the most interesting weather?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question. The questions are informed by recent events, course material, and whatever else bubbles out of my mind. It's been raining here, so...

What is the most interesting weather?

This question turned out to be an interesting survey of basically "what is the most interesting weather you have witnessed?" for many people.

Among the actual-weather/climate answers, artisanally hand-sorted by semantic nearness:

• sunny
• sunny rain
• warm rain
• raining when I know I'm gonna be indoors
• pouring rain
• light snow
• snowing
• fluffy snow
• lake effect snow, i.e., a mile wide band of several feet of snow (with areas on either side getting nothing)
• falling ash / magnificent sunsets during fire season (the closest SoCal gets to snow)
• hail
• "wintery-mix"
• thunderstorms
• thunder
• fog in the daytime
• dense fog
• cloudy
• partly cloudy
• when there are wavy lines on the horizon
• the season of inverse monsoons
• hurricane season; sometimes you get hail
• tornado; -- sky turns green
• all weather's interesting
• lava

I am astonished to learn that there is something real called "fire season". It sounds straight out of fiction. I'm not sure if "inverse monsoons" are real, but on balance the term seems believable so I've grouped it there. (If it's a cultural reference I've missed then... oops.)

The non-literal answers were fun, too.

• when justice rains from above
• the day I find my dad (<-- a="" across="" answer="" attendance...="" cropped="" days="" enough="" feel="" frequently="" has="" i="" is="" li="" many="" narrative="" student="" tell="" that="" the="" this="" to="" trying="" up="">
• bees
• oobleck (ooblick?)
• the heat death of the universe
• cats & dogs
• raining cats and dogs
• blood
• whether or not P=NP (<-- 5="" another="" hand-annotated="" li="" on="" one="" stars="" student="" this="">
• the dying hurricane on Jupiter

Several of these elicited guffaws, in particular those which played on the expectation that weather falls from the sky: blood?! bees! lava?!?! 

The teacher's preference award is tied this time between the weather/whether-P=NP joke and lava.

Congrats, everyone! Come back later this week and the beginning of next for the final two rounds of our silly contest.

This post's theme word is inspissate (v. tr., intr.), "to thicken or condense." The fine droplets of lava were manageable weather until they began to inspissate and collate, at which point the danger escalated quickly.