2021 quotes

 I: "Every online lecture is like a seance: Steve, can you hear me? --- give me a sign!"

Z: "This two-minute hazard distraction video is sponsored by Michael Bay."

re: students: "Let's not traumatize them more than is necessary... it's important to keep our goals realistic."

L: "I sent you the recipe for this sweater."

D: "You're usually an Eagles fan, right?"
M: "I'm an easy and willing turncoat."

F: "What happened? Did you take a pill of youth? You look amazing! Did you shave your beard?"
E: "Four years ago."

L: "I was so tired when I was done that I had to take a nap for two days."

H (regarding his rash): "Did I tell you, they took an autopsy?"

G (petting Ika): "Even [Z] doesn't look at me this deeply."

L (on omicron): "This is great. This is, like, nostalgia for the first part of the pandemic when I ordered groceries all the time."

C (Saturday, 3pm): "I think I can do this whole thing without a trip to Home Depot or Lowe's!" [and actually that came true!]

K: "I mean, who can say which direction the Earth spins in?"
D: "North-to-south. Prove me wrong."

A: "We can't follow every path, because in any kind of interesting code, there are infinitely many paths."

This post's theme word is revet (v), "to recheck or reexamine." Revetting my quote board and I do not remember the context of some of these.

Spring 2021 quotes

 I forgot to write attributions so here are some more-scrambled-than-usual quotes:

"Thank you! You've been sucked into the trap alongside me."
"I like being sucked into the trap."

"Are you going to issue some futures on that party?"

"There's two people in the house, so 'who ate it?' has an air of mystery."

"... the robot spy in your house who you just yell at."

D: "Nine times out of ten, if I have banged my head against it, it turns out the reverse triangle inequality does it."

Z: "That's a good question and I should have asked it, but I was a little flustered."
K: "The title of your memoir!"

D: "Um... this is when I need to have two copies of this book open, to flip back and forth."

"All curly-haired girls have an opinion of which founding father their ponytail looks like."

Z: "I like the policy of 'visitors should be neither seen nor heard.'"

S: "I think these [meetings] will be better in person."
J: "They can't be worse!"

Z: "X and I get into arguments about how to pronounce things. I'm like, I don't know if this is because you are 4 or because I came from a weird place."

G: "Why is that cat looking at the thermostat?"
Z: "I have no idea."

"pull request: check yourself before you wreck yourself, [username1]"

D: "Which is why, when your dog asks you a question, you say, 'That will be answered in the next paper.'"

L: ""My toenails are sore from being inside my socks yesterday."

K: "I'm five minutes into butts."

I: "At some point you can drive this probability high enough that your computer will spontaneously *crumble* with higher probability [than that this will fail]."

D: "I have to say that, until this morning, I was convinced that the three musketeers were mice."

Q: "The kid's clearly a knucklehead."

O: "If I need to, I can buy another computer, which will increase the number of computers in this house by... 1%?"

Z: "Python is the language that has unlimited late days."

Q: "I meant to put myself on mute but I turned off my video because I have no idea how Zoom works anymore."

Y: "I'm [X]'s niece, we won't get into how."

C: "Scraping the hair off your face every day is messing with nature."

Z: "Geocaching --- that's where you bury a server in your backyard."

I: "Beautiful. I did a probability."

J: "Hey, let's completely change everything at once and then try to cope with the ensuing disaster."

G: "Friends and the internet are about the same level of uselessness." 

Z: "Students will misunderstand, no matter what we do."

L: "That was Dad! I never used the word 'dynamite'. I prefer 'plastique'."

M: "You know these kids with college educations --- they can read!"

I: "Alright, what else is new, besides bad weather and rain and your illegal activities?"

K: "How about malaria?"
L: "Malaria is just... very inconvenient."

Z: "I think the idea of food and drink is insane."

Q: "They join the major late and are like, 'I picked up CS35 on the street.'"

I: "This hypercube is reaching the limits of my artistic sophistication."

Z: "Your department seems comparatively... cohesive. You all agree on stuff..."

I: "Knock yourself out on Complexity Zoo. But don't do it for the next half hour, we're in class."

This post's theme word is autokinesy (n), "self-propelled or self-directed motion or energy." The instinct to write down out-of-context quotes for my later self is a bit of psychic autokinesy; it goes back in my notes for more than twenty years.

Winter 2020 quotes

These have accumulated for awhile and I might've missed some as there is currently a "scratch notebook" infestation throughout the rooms of my house.

Out-of-context semi-anonymized quotes for your enjoyment!

I: "Evidence is really piling up for us living in a weird simulation. Let's have their teeth fall out, try that!"

M: "What's the official wine pairing for bacon-wrapped chicken?"
L: "Bacon-wrapped wine."

Z: "There's more red flags than potential here."

G: "I'm discovering things about people I never knew."
L: "By looking at their backgrounds?"
G: "By listening to what they say!"

N: "I like that JavaScript is being described as low-level here."

Z: "You accidentally muted yourself."
I: "No, I did it on purpose, but at the wrong time."

M: "I was such a good writer back then. That was before I went to grad school, I can tell."

F: "The problem with legacy code is, they did a lot of stuff in the past, and they keep doing it!"

Z: "Do you have a job, or is this, like, private daycare?"

D: "He died of syphilis because he had all these... incubis... you know?"

Z+D (simultaneously, uncoordinated): "Maybe don't do your taxes today."
M: "I think it'll work out in our favor!"

D: "Julius Caesar was not another Groundhog's Day."

L: "Isn't it being livestreamed on the IRS Facebook page?"
K: "That is a cursed sentence."

I: "I don't trust the government. I don't trust anyone! I don't trust myself! I do trust Paypal."

A: "Tomato grove?"
B: "Tomato thicket."

I, on the topic of grad school: "It was actually quite useful, but not directly."

F: "You know, I'm in a perfect position here to rob the bank."

R: "Can I promise that the results of this won't be used for evil, anywhere, ever? No."

I: "We're all just in a sorry state."

Z: "surveil and digitize" (which I suggested would be a good evil catchphrase)

L: "The problem with buying a fanny pack is..."

Z: "No, I don't want a duck-face filter, I want a duck filter. I want to look like a duck."

D: "When I look at the scores, I think... we shouldn't have explained to her how the points work."

L: "I like to say a long goodbye and get cut off so that my children feel an obligation to talk to me again soon."
D: "Mom, I don't think you should reveal the secrets of how you maintain the social contract!"

This post's theme word is meech (v), "to whine" or "to move in a furtive manner" or "to loiter." Stop meeching about the park, meeching to each other, I see you meeching over there!

Quote board, fall 2020

Inexplicably, people keep talking around me and my brain keeps latching on to the strange ways they arrange words and ideas.

K: "96% of your quarantine room capacity is available."
Z: "Book now and save!"

(assorted chorus of voices): "Did you get the spoiler for the back to cut down on air resistance? can it pop wheelies? how much does that keyboard bench?"

K: "You're getting feature requests from a feral cat?"
Z: "Yeah."

Z: "But your parents aren't there, right? As far as raucous house parties go, feeding your dog bacon to get her to like you is, like... fine."

Z: "Our hot take is that you need to just lubricate the freshmen so they have snail trails and can't actually get close to each other, they just slide off... we want to make McGill Walk into a slip'n'slide."

K: "I'm not a colonizer."
F: "It's widely regarded as a mistake."

R: "I once realized I was a WASP and was shocked."

F: "When Lenin was young and the revolution was strong, THAT would be the way to take power."

Q: "Stepford wives, if the Stepford wives were democrats."

F: "Sometimes it's a conjunctive AND and sometimes it's a disjunctive AND."

F: "It's the prosperity gospel of tenure lines."

D: "Tiny houses intended for birds: very cute. It is a truth universally acknowledged."

K: "Have you tuned the wheelbarrow?"
L: "I've been trying to hit it with a hammer. I'll post it on YouTube."

F: "I've been appreciative from the beginning. And I'm waiting to receive one more... make it blue to match my eyes."

? (from a 66-person video call): "That is a way not to have a coup: you think you're on private chat but you broadcast to the entire school."

? (on 142-person call): "I look forward to meeting some of you in person one day."

L: "I don't exactly understand the science of Wifi --- I know it's little elves that fly through the air and whisper the voices of other people..."
K,M, and O (simultaneously): "You basically got it."

R: "Static! I only hear it when you're talking."
Z: "That's just my midwestern accent."

L: "In the sewing room --- well, in the third sewing room, ..."

S: "If you don't like my build infrastructure, we can talk about that offline." FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Z: "[Q] has been on sabbatical for the past 10 years, so..."
Q: "from future import *"

N: "I have to say, for me, experiencing it on film was sufficient."
Z: "You don't feel the call to the southern pole?"

D: "Some would argue that this 'premium content' is not, in fact, content. But I would argue that it takes time to watch and is unedited."

D (in response to me): "Lila, did you lose your Zoom premium? I'm getting ads." (I did a funny bit!)

Z: "Extend the cat a line of credit. [beat] Step 3, profit."

R: "Stepford wives, if the Stepford wives were democrats."

I: "Is that your foot in front of you?"
N: "That's his face."

C: "Can the system keep the chipmunks out?"
D: "Are the chipmunks committing identity fraud using your credit card?"

N: "I succumbed to the lure of firecrackers in my youth, so I remember the attraction."

F: "I found a way around it."
N: "He naturalized the bayonet."

R: "Plus their proprietary blend of whatever they think almonds taste like."

C (distantly, off-camera): "Ooooh! Ow ow ow!"
N (distantly, off-camera): "I gave birth to three children, it hurt more than this."

F: "That was when the sun didn't rise. That day."

K: "I have a +1 resistance to emotional damage."
F: "I need to activate that."

D: "Our first thought was to go to Denver. But it's far away and on fire."

Z: "I lightly overshopped because I was excited about the squash."

M: "What is the saying?"
A: "More money, more problems."
M: "Oh. My first thought was, more children, more problems."

D: "Here's my backend. Please engineer it to something useful. I wrote... no test cases."

D (on Zoom): "I'm streaming this on Instagram Live right now."

L: "If I misunderstand something, you can be almost sure I didn't misunderstand it."

N: "Congratulations on assembling those Ikea shelves."
Z: "It is what I was raised to do."

U: "I don't know how much we can train people to be nice."

F: "You've solved the dilemma! I'm going to die in a warehouse fire."

K: "If you lose by 5 pants I will be very interested to see how that plays out."

D: "You definitely shouldn't buy a vintage electric blanket."

K: "I like to turn the cereal box off and on again."
L: "On the cereal box, they hide the controls."

Z: "Do I not know my own course number?"

F: "It's not screwed over in the sense that... I could have played better. But I didn't."

L: "Rampantly floating with pubic hairs."

J: "Bread is the bread of life."

D (faintly, with astonishment): "Oh, Mom, you added me to your friends."

D: "It's your turn. Disappointingly, I am prepared to talk you through beating me."

J: "It's about the journey. The slow, inexorable journey."

K: "I can't believe we're moving past 'arbitorium'!"
L: "Arbitrarium!"
M: "Arboretum?"
N: "I got it, clearly: Lab of Ornithology." (<-- this was, unbelievably, correct!)

Z: "I just think --- and I hear myself saying this as it comes out --- when people ask questions they don't think about what they don't know."

K: "How'd you get out of the pentagram?"
F: "It's a demon-backed demon trust."

Z: "It's hard to both get off at the same time. It's also hard to both go down at the same time." (IIRC this was about internet service uptime but WOW)

F: "A mountain of lawyers, in a giant mech suit, as another lawyer. With missiles."

Z: "We're just multiplying matrices by vectors in my course, man, I'm not touching that third rail."

Z: "The other thing --- there are lots of problems bathroom-related --- living with my sister..."

Z: "They came up with 2 major options to save money. One was to demolish the building."

R: "If you decapitate someone, it's rated R."

This post's theme word is heterophemy (n), "the use of a word different from the one intended." It's easy to get on the quote board by accidental heterophemy in earshot of me.

Quotes, summer 2020

I jotted down many quotes in this time interval, because every. single. social. interaction. now feels deeply meaningful and like a carefully conserved resource. Plus they're all happening over video chat, so my notebook is always at-hand. Here is a selection (some quotes were expurgated for being too personal, or too crass when out-of-context); my apologies that my name-randomizing algorithm does only one letter/person, and so has a lot of collisions in the namespace.

M: "I'm super-enjoying not owning things."

Z: "I'm sure there's middle-management goats."

M: "I have the, like, the limping-along ovary."

Z: "Moving online is just an endless stream of apps that stink."

B: "We're DnD role-playing millennial fantasy: we all have stable jobs and healthy relationships with good communication."

B: "Climb the clocktower?"
K: "That's the kind of thing I should wait until AFTER I have tenure to do."

J: "Filibuster #4 has been my favorite"

I: "I am confident our future department chair can be nimble and flexible in the upcoming Battle Royale."

Z: "A lot of this makes no sense."

K: "We learned: everything is bad and nobody is happy."

K: "I can't wait to read your bestselling business novel about How Not to be a Craven Bootlicker." 

Q: "Basically everything the administration does is a giant fuck-you to student culture."

Y: "... not disappointed with the decision, more disappointed with reality."

Y: "You can't compress coding time."

I: "What happens in a COVID year stays in a COVID year."

Z: "I have to look up what is legal or not legal in Pennsylvania."
Q: "Most things are legal if you don't get caught."

N: "[name redacted] stepped on my glasses. I'm trying to fix them."
N': "With a pine cone?"

Z: "All KINDS of things can happen!"
Q: "Meteors?"
Z: "Hurricane season's just getting started."

M: "Oooh, all this talk of working out, I'm sweating."

Z (offhandedly): "high-functioning democracy here"

M: "In theory, anything can be ruined with any move."

N: "If you go by feel you'll know what to do."
Z: "You might be setting your expectations of [name redacted] a bit high."

N: "Winter is coming." (w.r.t. self-haircuts)

Z: "Koi are domesticated carp. They'll eat trash. They're aquatic goats."

Z: "We need to think about how to teach our classes. We can't spend all our time doing other people's jobs."

M: "I don't like shoreline poop."

D: "To Americans right now, euros are fantasy currency."

N: "When I began my homeowning episode..."

Z: "I got the email that Swarthmore ran out of electricity." (i.e., power outage)
Z': "I like that phrasing."

Z: "Postmodern algebra... it's like Bauhaus meets rings and groups."

C: "[name redacted]'s like, this is lovely, I love being so confused."

C: "I tried to write 'an exercise left to the reader' in my homework."
Z: "In physics you can totally just insert a random minus sign to make it work."

C: "I ended up playing with my tmix configuration for a day and a half."
Z: "Quarantine life! ... why do something in 4 keystrokes when you could do it in 3?"

N: "He had it apart several times this week, doing exploratory surgery." (re: the dryer)

N: "You're living the life! Tomorrow you'll be 90 and you found a secret medication that lets you eat salami!"

Z: "I snoozed the email and hoped it would go away in a week. It has not gone away."

K: "We had a really similar form that was much shorter but still as stupid as this one."

N: "The serger so ups the quality of your sewing."
F: "It doesn't if you don't use it."

F: "Bike doula."
K: "I think you mean 'sherpa'."

K: "You're very badly-behaved children." (re: some adults)
F (parent): "They could be worse."

Z: "For upper-level courses I have no problem offering both, and if one of them just dies a natural death, that's fine."

N: "The 38th is conventionally the bandsaw anniversary. ... the 39th is the home security system for birds."

I: "We don't get updates because the policy is changing, we get updates because the slogan is changing."

Z: "Thank god there's a deadly virus around so we don't have to focus on Brexit anymore."

I: "That crisis only affects teenagers, so we don't care."

Z (product pitch): "Each week you get a box of foods that people won't purchase even in an emergency."

Z: "Thank god for climate change and the death of the amphibian."

Z: "Could the Ottomans competently administer a test to teens? I say, welcome to our new Ottoman overlords."

Z: "Someone pored over the outline of the eagle thing. Gotta get paid somehow."

Z: "Everybody universally hates the robot, which is the appropriate response."

Q: "Static! I only hear it when you're talking."
Z: "That's just my midwestern accent."

Z: "I was uncomfortable because I'm an idealist."

N: "It's a circular saw at the end of a string trimmer."
M: "Wait, like... Mad Max?"

[D joins the video chat]
All others: "Good morning! Welcome to Vasectomy Talk."

Z: "I have walked less than 20 steps today & all of them were on this camera."

D: "Whoever is playing the video of my voice, can you mute it?"

Firstborn: "Everyone knows I'm the one who inherits the titles and lands."
Secondborn: "And I have the right to marry a divorcée."
Thirdborn: "And I'm supposed to go into the clergy?"
[laughter]
Parent: "I love my children! That was the best possible answer! Perfect!

Q: "They'll only hear your yowls of pain when you're shocked for typing on the keyboard wrong."

This post's theme word is lithophone (n), "a musical instrument which is sounded by striking pieces of stone." It's easy to fall down a quarantine video rabbit-hole and watch many modern and ancient lithophones played.

Live theatre, sort of

WHEREAS the ongoing pandemic and various other elements of environmental, social, political, economic, and biological disaster loom large, and

WHEREAS the rational fairly strict self-quarantine (of those who are able) has, since March, severely limited occasions to socialize and gather in groups for the purposes of mutually enjoying culture and company, it is

HEREBY ACKNOWLEDGED that having so many performers shift to an online method for displaying their art to a geographically disparate crowd has, in fact, WIDENED this reader's ability to financially support the artists she loves while appreciating their performances in real-time.

Everything's on a screen, and frankly having to see my family only in delineated, buffered, pixelated windows feels much more limiting than having to see live performers in windows. Realistically these performers would have been mostly inaccessible because they were not touring my locality; so I find a tiny sliver of redemption for 2020 in the broader access to live art. The rest of 2020 should consider itself still on blast for its shortcomings.

This post's theme word is rort (n), "a wild party." I have tickets to watch shows three nights this week, from the comfortable pajama-clad rort of my own sofa!

A hundred days of quarantine

We've passed 100 days of self-isolation but, in the tradition of this blog, I missed it exactly and will just post some half-finished thoughts here to expurgate them from my mind. Welcome to approximately the 112th day of solitude. And unlike grad school, there's no end in sight.

I miss people. It turns out that many of my pastimes actually required people, or at least the passing proximity of others, and are now extremely ill-advised and mostly unavailable. Board games are so great in-person as a way to escape into a shared brain-space with friends; at a distance, board games (and pretty much everything else) take a lot more effort and yield a lot less feeling of shared camaraderie. Ditto rock climbing, but extremely more so. And forget singing along during road trips --- the travel, the singing, the enclosed space, all of it is now verboten to the pandemic-pragmatic.

I miss the full-bandwidth promise of a real-time in-person conversation, one where no one drops out, no one freezes, talking over each other can be moderated by subtle physical and social cues, and my headphones do not leave a grooved imprint of my glasses on my skull.

I miss the fantasy I once held, maybe a decade ago in the midst of my extremely academic studies, that I might be living in a golden age of rationality and scientifically-founded decision-making. I miss the feeling that I might be effective or a positive influence on others, and I'm struggling to see how to "pivot" (eugh) my skills, which are almost 100% cultivated for in-person activities, to be effective and useful in a permanent pandemic world. I miss feeling like I can be effective at all, beyond donating my money and privilege to try to ameliorate the many ravaging horrors of our age. From a distance, of course.

Positively: I've cleaned my house, and it's staying quite clean. (I'm the only one who can enjoy this or pass judgment on inadequately-dusted ledges, anyway.) All houseplants are flourishing. I'm doing yardwork. I'm 2 full weeks ahead on my workout plan. I'm working on a lot of solitary at-home projects that would otherwise have languished. I'm contemplating what I want to do with the rest of my life to try to have a positive impact; I'm answering emails, letters, and postcards, and pumping the snail-mail system full of words, feelings, and time-delayed connections. I've learned to bake cheese in pastry crust. I've reworked my budget to enable more donations. I'm watching performances from artists I would never get to see in-person, as everyone has been forcibly shoved online, so they are effectively closer and more available to me than previously.

I'm waking every morning to shake my fists at the Gods of Bandwidth and propitiate the Lesser Deities of Lag and Latency.

I wonder...
... when was my last hug? I remember one pretty late, but was that truly my last hug?
... when was my last handshake? Will that be the final handshake of my life?
... when was the last time I ate in a restaurant? I don't remember. Maybe that will never happen again.
... when will I next see my family? Paradoxically it will probably not be enjoyable to see them because of the apprehension that the very act of meeting will impose a danger on everyone involved.

I think I could last a long time, a psychologically inadvisable time, in socially distant isolation. Comparing it with the risk of transmitting disease, contributing to transmitting disease, or myself becoming sick, and remaining isolated looks like a moral imperative. Whether by my example or by the incidental impact of self-selecting out of the situations where transmission occurs, this seems like my only acceptable mode of conduct. YMMV.

Don't worry. I'm not a hermit. I have an extremely healthy correspondence; I am an active letter-writer. And of course, now as always, I am a being that consists 80% of Simply Being Online.

Plus ça change.

This post's theme word is empanoply (v. tr.), "to enclose in complete armor." We are advised to empanoply ourselves at home, and I have empanoplied this cheese in flaky pastry.

Quote board

I usually write notable quotes on the whiteboard in my office, which over the course of the semester accumulates a border of these snippets of wit and strangeness. This semester we transferred to a remote-everything model in which people still say strange things. So the metaphorical whiteboard has still been accumulating quotes; I copied down all the actual whiteboard quotes before abandoning my office for plague-avoidance reasons.

D: "This head's got a lot of other s*** in it."
L: "It really doesn't."

L: "Where those ninjas at"

A: "Life is an endless series of we trying to entangle things"

Z: "That sentence is surprisingly technically correct."

Z: "It is oftentimes the case that if people in my class don't learn what I'm teaching, they learn a valuable lesson instead."

D: "Dude, our network can't support five baboons!"

M: "I promise I'm not evil, but I do blame you for the development of my evil thinking skill!"

K, on our first Zoom call: "I just think that it's a lot easier to get things done if we're in-person." DUH

Z: "It's not an instructional cooking show. It's a show of me, cooking."

D: "saber-tooth tigers or gtfo"

I: "Damn you, linguistic prescriptivism. I cannot be free."

Y: ""It's never been written down.  It was just kind of something I was told.": every long-standing Swarthmore College policy"

I: "This is the co-recognizer sleight-of-hand where you make the looping go into the co-recognizing part." (I'm charmed by the idea of co-recognizable sleight-of-hand, where it sometimes fails and that's all you care about, not the successes! It's a magican's trick that is broken!)

L: "Sounds like a corner store in Mordor."

Q: "Quarantine is the perfect time to take up falconry."

O: "I had a lot of thoughts, but then I came up with a proof and the thoughts went away."

Q: "I started eating it as a power move"

S1: "Imagine a room that is a perfect cube..."
S2: "I can't imagine anything! I've been inside too long!"

I: "the dangers of emerging from my small, hegemonic area of dominion"

K: “I picture you as a birdlike person with twigs for bones”

Q: "my main photo editor is Microsoft Word... graphic design is a passion"

S: "I think we're a department of pretty reasonable people. Externally."

Q: "Internally, all bets are off."

I: "You don't have to share my feelings about math, but... nothing you've done is wrong. Yet."
L: "That's what we love to hear."
C: "It's been years since I saw this many numbers."

L: "This is so much worse than proving that something IS big O of something."

O: "I'll just be a Piazza fool."

K: "I accept that your answer is unconventionally correct."
I: "That's the best kind! [maniacal laughter]"

Z: "I had mistakenly thought that in our whole system, the section with the most history would have their... act together. [But instead they have] The most trash fire!"

S: "We should not be planning to kill ourselves to this extent."

Z: "I should've been thinking..."
J: "We should get that on a shirt for you."
Z: "Cruel but justified."
Q "... and that's on the back."

I: "I obviously shouldn't be in charge of the world's supply of moon rocks."

It's been a long and strange semester, conducted half in isolation and yet with much more explicit acknowledgments of the Interactions That Matter. Thanks everyone for sticking with it this long, and for chatting with me even though I am badly-surreptitiously taking notes and writing down your quotes as we go.


This post's theme word is kythe (v tr), "to make known; to manifest; to show; to declare." I kythe that the spring 2020 semester is over!

Peter and the Wolf

Swarthmore College Lab Orchestra's presentation of Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf was delightful --- playful, cute, fun, and with an auditorium full of children who shrieked at the scary parts. Like many others in the audience, I brought my parents, and we all had an enriching time. I particularly appreciated that we were invited onstage after the performance to chat with the musicians and look at their instruments up-close.

We later in the afternoon remembered that the iconic wolf music was the "bully" theme music from A Christmas Story.


This post's theme word is exclosure (n), "a fenced area, especially in a wide open area, to keep unwanted animals out." The wolf was captured outside the exclosure!

Family joy

'Tis the season to ritually retreat to the place of your birth (or at least wherever your strongest familial anchor is) and Spend Time Together. Hooray!

An upwelling of goodwill and warm familial emotional comfort to you, to me, to all of us. Here in my snowy childhood retreat, I am surrounded by snark and sotto-voce comments and offhand references to literature and clever puns about math and it is like being immersed in a warm, soft pool of almost-mirrors of myself. In the least egotistical way possible, it's delightful and I love all these people intensely.

Here are some amusing and mostly out-of-context snippets of the family holiday season, which as usual, extends well into January.

"Every pushup is like 10^{-6} points. It's like mining Bitcoin."

"There's a microbrewery like every 3 blocks in Ithaca now." (originally tweeted)

Re: wisdom teeth and roommate
"Sarah won't let me decorate with them."
"First strike."
"She's a sensible girl."

Alert: we've had to unfurl the backup cheese board for auxiliary cheese feasting. (originally tweeted)

"Shitty superpower: the Man who Makes Women Menstruate. ... maybe there was a local election. A school board election? Those happen every year."

"If you just WATCH me do the chores, it doesn't count towards your chore wheel, Jayjay."
"Lila, usually dogs don't HAVE a chore wheel." (originally tweeted)

"I know there's a cure for hepatitis C, but there's no need to jump headlong into it."

"You might think there is a time signature. There is not."
"This is a seal attempting to play an electronic harmonica. Underwater."

"These tights are the #1 bestseller in beekeeping supplies!"
"Beekeeping tights are NOT a thing."

Suave pickup line, delivered slimily: "You might not know this, but the real numbers? They're ordered."

"What the hell is that thing, Ernie?"
"It's hair containment. You might not be familiar."

Regarding his own conception: "I'm sorry, that was the best sperm I could get, Andrei."

"I don't see the sloths."
"The sloths are right in front of you!"
"Those are 100% rhinos."
"Oh, yeah."
(originally tweeted)

"My boobs are so low now, they can't hold anything up."

Attempt and failure at generating a pithy saying: "If wishes were fishes, then... dishes... would... britches?" (originally tweeted)

"He's bludgeoning the cheese into slices."

Someone left on Google voice assistant, which chimed in, unexpected: (originally tweeted)
"Can I help you find something?"
"Find the yeti!"
(it did not oblige)

"Isotropic pressure!" (re: hats) (originally tweeted)

On e-shopping as you fall asleep: "... it's very hard to get the best price." (originally tweeted)

"Just think, if that had been a rink, you'd be wearing sequins to work." (originally tweeted)

... now, back to work, one and all!


This post's theme word is exeleutherostomize (v intr), "to speak freely." The pithy, flippant people exeleutherostomize when amongst family.

Family quips

Gather sufficient clever and verbose people together, and the resulting tumult of verbiage will dazzle and astound. And, I hope, amuse. Here is a selection of quotes from a recent family gathering --- keep in mind, these were only in conversations I witnessed*, and these were only the things I remembered long enough to jot down. I've interspersed other notes, not quotes, of things that happened.

"I made it sweet for you! ... sweet with chili beans."

"Why is your foot so far away from your body?"
"... I don't know."

"Look, you have all these ingredients, you have to use them all..."

"They made that noise, you know, like when someone chews with their mouth open the week before you get your period and you just want to smack them like aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."

A rederivation, on the fly and from first principles, of cold-smithing techniques for certain metals.

"I'm telling you, Mom, I'm not going to adopt a child this fiscal year."

"No, no, it's a theoretical machine that I carry around in my brain."

Regarding sourdough starter:
"You feed the baby, but first you discard half the baby and make sure the other half hasn't died."
"I think nurturing a baby and yeast are a little different."

There was a point in the evening when all the some adults took out their smartphones and installed Snapchat, and then started trying to have snapchat interactions. Hilariously. (I think the youths did not appreciate the situational comedy.)

Pedantry about "=":
"Ernie's mastery of breads and baking! ... it's unequalled in the Western hemisphere. But you don't know how many decimal places we're using to measure."

"That just looks like something you took out of a dumpster."
"Initially, yes, but..."

"It was so nice to see you --- I was so impressed that at one time I fell asleep." (Said without sarcasm.)

Just before the (brief) break for this USian holiday, the students on my course message board asked, "What is a Fontes Thanksgiving like"? These same industrious and forum-using students also posted a poll whose results revealed that several of the students read this blog. This post goes out to you, then, my students: you are almost done with me (this semester), but for now you remain in my pedagogical clutches and I remain tethered to your minds, trying to squeeze in more knowledge in the scant remaining weeks.

*I'm a possible confounding factor here, I acknowledge that.


This post's theme word is fissiparous (adj), "tending to break into parts" or "reproducing by biological fission." The Fissiparous Fonteses are feared far and near.

Sainte Chapelle

I revisited the royal chapel today with my favorite PhD tour guide. The usual flair for historical detail and neat technical observations was continued. My photos from inside the chapel were too blurry to convey its awe-inspiring, towering sheets of intricate stained glass, rising up to the heavens, but the outside stonework detailing was also nice.

Stonework on a lower wall panel, exterior of Sainte Chapelle.

And extremely French. They love that fleur-de-lis, it's on everything.

This post's theme word is hagiarchy, "a government by holy persons." The lifelong grooming of a royal saint should not be confused with a hagiarchy; this instance was certainly a helicopter-parent-iarchy.

Children and quality of life

My mother, this morning: "Lila, this [gift] you gave me has improved my quality of life tremendously!"

My response: "... and they say that having children doesn't improve your quality of life!"


This post's theme word is paean, "an expression of praise, joy, or triumph, traditionally in the form of a song." She exclaimed a quick paean in honor of the gift.

Regarding uterus rent and the rapture

Why be nice to your mother?

Mother: "It's interest on the uterine rent!"
Father: "I don't think you're paying down that principal at all."

These are the things we discuss on the day that the Rapture was foretold, at 6pm, respecting time zones across the world:

M.: "At what point do people stop listening to the guy who can't get the calculations right?"
L.: "Well, he's calculated that, and he's still within the safe margins."

Later that day, as a possible reprimand from On High for my insolence, my rapturously delicious food was raptured right out of me, via violent vomiting, leaving me behind, queasy and sinful. Apparently the Rapture gives me food poisoning. I'm still here and still blogging; wherever you are, you're still reading, too.


This post's theme word is gotterdammerung, "the complete destruction of an institution, regime, order, etc." That saag executed a gotterdamerung on my digestive process yesterday.

Ice cream baksheesh

I'm visiting. Here is the welcome I received:

Lila, you know I love you, so in preparation for your visit, I bought mint chocolate chip ice cream.

Then I ate it all.

But then I bought two mint chocolate chip ice creams, so there's probably some left now.

This post's theme word is baksheesh, "a payment, such as a tip or bribe."

Easter egg hunt

In partial repayment of many years of delightful Easter egg hunts in childhood, A. and I arranged a hunt of sorts for D. How many eggs can you see?
Instead of chocolate eggs and candy, we decorated tiny boxes of cereal with eggs made out of colored paper.
As is traditional, the "eggs" are hidden in plain sight, although not always easily reachable.
Some cleverness was exercised in the placement of the eggs. Much fun was had by all.

As is also traditional, some eggs were found long after the hunt had concluded, although I think we escaped the tradition of finding last year's eggs during this year's hunt. Since the last time I participated in an Easter egg hunt in this house was more than a decade ago, to find a forgotten egg now would be quite surprising.



This post's theme word is schwarmerei, "extravagant enthusiasm" or "excessive sentimentality." The foolish egg hunt was an exuberant schwarmerei.

Happy birthday

Happy birthday to me, Google, and Scott Pilgrim! Also B. Thanks to the parents who (1) conceived me, (2) birthed me, (3) raised me, and (4) visited me this pre-birthday weekend, carrying flavorful apples from home. In that order.


This post's featured word is a really cool one I haven't been able to work into any other post: coelom, "a cavity lined by an epithelium derived from mesoderm. Organs formed inside a coelom can freely move, grow, and develop independently of the body wall while fluid cushions and protects them from shocks."

More honestly, this post's theme words: bedlam, "an old woman; a hag," and the related word termagant, "a scolding, nagging, bad-tempered woman."

Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day! Be nice to a mother today. Don't wait! Belated wishes just aren't as good:

This post's theme word: homologate, "to approve officially."

Roller derby

I went to see a roller derby match last month with A. and co. It was fun, and reminiscent of rugby -- lots of falling (on pavement! with helmets and pads!) and physicality, girls whipping each other around the corner and elbowing. An unexpectedly large amount of using one's own bottom as a blocking device. I don't think I'd want to play (among other reasons: it involves makeup and decidedly unsporting outfits), but it was fun to watch. The teams' themes and silly names were cute. I rooted for last year's champions, the math/nerd-themed team wearing bright green dresses, but they lost in a close game.


This post is brought to you by the letter G.

Christmas photos

I've posted them on facebook. This one summarizes the whole vacation:
Chocolate.


This post's theme word: ineluctable, "impossible to avoid." Meals comprising only chocolate-based foods were ineluctable.