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.

Reunion summary, part II

Months of persistent nagging, often several times a day, was insufficient this time. Most of the class defaulted and failed to submit any self-summary for our next reunion (and accompanying book). This forced the alumni office to give us an extension and step up the guilt-tripping to previously-unexplored reaches of extremity.

Lo! and behold: it worked. Well, a bit. I'll admit that I didn't put as much pizzazz and creative obfuscation into this one as the last one. (In my defense, I now have a job which offers me a lot less free time for creative writing projects on the side.)

My quest for evil mastermindhood continues apace. I have maximally levelled up on the education ladder, and collected one degree of each type (arts, science, philosophy); I now demand to be addressed by my full title ("Professor Doctor Master..."), which is becoming an onerous time-delay during dramatic entries.

Since last we met, I moved to Canada, and then, when that proved insufficiently French, I moved to Paris itself. O! that epitome of French stereotypes: the glorious boulevards, the wine/bread/cheese, the magnificently sneery accents. Many truly marvelous adventures were had, which this margin is too narrow to contain. After nearly a decade abroad, I reluctantly returned to domestic shores in pursuit of that most elusive of quest objectives: tenure.

I return to the US a well-travelled, multilingual, and even-more-highly educated person, all things which serve me well for making small talk and getting pigeonholed. As a professor of computer science, I know a lot about both pigeons and holes. Ask me sometime.

I promise to give you homework. (Due date: the next reunion.)

If unnamed editors change anything, that'll pretty much determine my non-participation in future editions. (Last time they threatened that editors might take action, but the final version was what I had submitted, ridiculosity unchanged.)

These periodic check-ins seem decreasingly relevant in the networked social media sphere in which I dwell: everyone I want to hear about, I already do hear about; we are already in touch. And everyone else? Reading about them in the paper-printed book (!) will be useful, but mostly for tracking how many future CEOs and congresspeople I knew in their early 20s.


This post's theme word is aesculapian, "relating to medicine," or "a doctor." I usually introduce myself as "a doctor, but not the type that helps people", but I am considering condensing this to "a non-aesculapian doctor", to alienate all but the most erudite.

Sexual harrassment in academia

This post on sexual harrassment as a long con in academia is worth a signal boost.

As such, defeating sexual harassment... will require a fundamental restructuring of the way we do business, and a reeducation of our field—all of us—in matters related to the culture of science and academe. This will not be easy because our culture fosters a deep distrust and even hostility toward the "soft sciences" such as sociology and psychology that provide us with the best tools for addressing our pervasive inequities. But if we are truly interested in a meritocratic scientific community that makes full use of its talent pool to understand the Universe, we'll see this as a worthwhile investment. Until we do, there will be more stories filling more inboxes as we collectively shoot ourselves in the feet.

Thank you to the author, who used his male privilege to make a stink and write a post that would have received worse internet harassment, dismissal, and personal criticism if it had come from a woman.

This post's theme word is roue, "a debauched man, especially an elderly man from a wealthy or aristocratic family." The academic roue was booted in a rout!

Bleak outlook for academic postdocs

This article in Nature offers a bleak outlook for science postdocs.

The problem is the aggregation of individual human actions. If the system as a whole could change (as per the US National Academies' recommendation, or the article's call for synchronized, systemic global change), then the problem would be easily fixed. Of course! Simplify away all the complexities, and a theoretical approach can surely offer many solutions [she says, tongue-in-cheek].

In the absence of unanimous, organized global overhaul of the scientific research system, what to do? I take the retrospective of Dr. Thuault-Restituito seriously. I have come to a similar conclusion, luckily much earlier in "the pipeline." I am lucky to have the luxury of choice --- if the system is not treating me nicely, I can take my training and education and leave. I can contribute, and find stable, productive, interesting employment elsewhere. I am mentally and personally flexible. I can switch universities, or countries. I can leave academia. If everyone had such freedom (and stubborn self-respect), then again we would find ourselves in a simplified system where decade-long underpaid, precariously-renewed postdocs are eliminated, for lack of a population willing to subjugate themselves to such treatment.

Aside from solving my own (local) problem by simply refusing to participate, I feel some social obligation to contribute to improving the complicated system as a whole. I'm just not sure how to do that from my current position (or indeed from any position whatsoever, even as director of an entire government's science funding agency).

As with all things in science, we continue to fumble towards* understanding and improvement.

This post's theme word is lebensraum, "space required for living, growth, and development." Some postdocs are academic bonsai, continually pruned and hemmed-in, prevented from obtaining the lebensraum needed to progress professionally.

*my least-favorite preposition to see in any scientific context, esp. when accompanied by "understanding"!

Defended

The sun is shining, the air is frozen, the snowfall is coating the ground. Winter is here.

I have defended, with success.


This post's theme word is apophasis, "allusion to something by denying it will be said." I will not, in the present or in the future, bring every conversation around to the fact that I am a doctor.

Strike slogans!

I am compulsorily a member of the graduate student union. It looks increasingly likely that we will go on strike later this month. In my opinion, both the union side and the employer side are fractionally reasonable, but mostly just irritating.

The union emails regarding the prolonged bargaining/strike action are so numerous that they squeezed through even A.'s anti-union email filters. This is okay, because it resulted in some hilarious strike chant suggestions.

Envision: a group of 20 grad students (mostly political science, although I can't imagine why) in front of a university administration building. A. holds a bullhorn and leads them in call-and-response:
"You don't know how good you've got it!"
"WE DON'T KNOW HOW GOOD WE'VE GOT IT!"
"You don't know how good you've got it!"
"WE DON'T KNOW HOW GOOD WE'VE GOT IT!"
"You don't know how good you've got it!"
"WE DON'T KNOW HOW GOOD WE'VE GOT IT!"
A member of the crowd takes the bullhorn and begins a different chant.
"What is a farce?"
"THIS IS A FARCE!"
"What is a farce?"
"THIS IS A FARCE!"
"What is a farce?"
"THIS IS A FARCE!"
"What is a farce? -- no, for real, my English TA is on strike, I need help with my homework!"


This post's theme word is coprolalia, "involuntary swearing or the involuntary utterance of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks." Best to avoid coprolalia in proximity of a microphone.

Framing mathematics

No, not framing it for a crime. I just read the article A Revolution in Mathematics? What Really Happened a Century Ago and Why It Matters Today by Frank Quinn (math professor). It establishes a surrounding explanation for how modern mathematics came to be structured as it is. In the process, it contrasts two ways of thinking about mathematics: the "old" style, and mathematical sciences, wherein math relates to observable facts and is intuitive (but often yields incorrect results), and the "new" style, which he calls the "core" of mathematical research, wherein math is the study of abstract rules which do not relate to reality (but whose results are provably, rigorously correct).

It is fascinating.

I had never paused to consider the evolution of my discipline. Yet Prof. Quinn highlights and summarizes my experience of grade-school math education: everything seemed much clearer and more reasonable when -- finally! -- worked as abstract symbols according to rules. This is how I learned geometry (my first proofs!), trigonometry, and calculus. I cannot imagine attempting to learn calculus through intuition. What terror! (Does this infinite series feel like it converges? What's your hunch about the derivative of f(x)?) And of course now in retrospect I think of the math I learned earlier -- multiplication, fractions, arithmetic -- in the more advanced terms I learned later.

The article was summarized for me by this: "the old dysfunction was invisible, whereas the new opacity is obvious." Yes, math is opaque; I've studied for years and this is the first thing I'd admit. And my topics are squarely in the "new/core" section: I've done research in precise definitions, logical proofs, completeness. Carefully justifying each step is a technique that I use in my dreams. Math for me has always been its own arena of knowledge, one of three (the humanities, sciences, and math), each with its own methods. Even though we use the science word "discovery," a mathematical discovery is nothing of the sort. And as a grad student, I am amazed at what other grad students do as "research."


This post's theme word is anemometer, "an instrument for measuring the speed of wind." This magical anemometer predicts the trends in sociology research!

Reunion summary

Months of persistent nagging from various Harvard offices have yielded results. I wrote my 5-year reunion summary of myself. Apparently there will be a book printed and mailed, containing these self-reflecting essays. Here, for your enjoyment, is my submission:

I continue my quest to become an evil mastermind. After obtaining a M. Sc. degree in 2009, I took a brief break from permanent studenthood. During the summer, I set a new world record for hot air balloon distance, travelling from Uqbar to Toronto, Canada in several difficult weeks. Returning to a Ph. D. program that fall, I continue to advance the boundaries of mathematical computer science. Summers are spent strengthening my secret lair, the Gulf coast campus of which was unfortunately broached in 2010, resulting in the tragic loss of my oil collection.

Few people thus far have complied with my desire to be addressed as "mistress (of science)." I hope to finish my next degree soon, so that I can insist on being called "doctor" instead. I continue the development of the chaturathalon, combining alpine skiing, archery, synchronized swimming, and rugby -- truly a sport for all seasons!

I am currently accepting minion applications. Benefits of the position include: unlimited pie, lending library access, and strong encouragement to participate in the employee fitness program. Minions thus far have assisted in writing a short novel of octopus-themed (and -targeted) erotica, executing art projects, and participating in a delightful email list. (Like most email lists, this consists mostly of sharing YouTube videos.) Future plans include creation of matching hats for all minions.

The submission page warned that unnamed editors may change my entry. I wonder what the published one will say.


This post's theme word is vitiate, "to spoil or impair the quality or efficiency of," or "to destroy or impair the legal validity of." Certain claims may vitiate my autobiography.

Good morning

One of the nicest things about being a graduate student is the freedom to set my own hours. If I am up early (as today) I can be in the office early (as I am now) and working (as soon as this is posted). I will have a couple of hours here to work, alone* and quiet, before the other early-rising student (my officemate) arrives.

*When I entered the lab, ~7a.m., I did disturb the rest of the office squatter, who sleeps here. But I don't really feel bad about that, because: sleeping in an office. I'm here on legitimate business, to use the lab for research purposes.


This post's theme word is ante-jentacular, "before breakfast." I accomplished several ante-jentacular tasks today!

Concerning the Protestant hegemony

Over the weekend A1 and I had the opportunity to talk with A2. (They are numbered for the sake of clarity; my identity-protecting initial scheme has limitations.) During the course of our long and fascinating discussion, I often lost the thread of the current argument and found myself tuning back in with (nearly) a blank slate. My mind was insufficient -- out of practice -- to store so many complicated and interconnected soft topics. (I'm good at hard topics: give me a handful of mathematical definitions and some theorems anytime.)

At one such moment, I found myself listening to a sentence which ended:

"... secularism is, itself, a symptom of the Protestant hegemony."

I promptly gagged on the water I was drinking and spent the next few minutes attempting to recover my aplomb. This is not because I thought the speaker silly, but rather because, at first glance and lacking the depth of background understanding and nuance which this statement surely requires, it struck me as a funny sentence. Because, you know, secularism is usually defined as the opposite of religion (religiosity?), and whatever the Protestant hegemony is, it has to do with religion. It's right there in the title.

In due time -- politely allowing for my recovery -- A2 explained the statement to my satisfaction. (I cruelly withhold this information from you. May your imaginations run rampant!)

This left me with the reflection: in the humanities, scholars get to define not only their fields, but the very meanings of the words that they use to define, describe, and discuss those fields. In this way they are not so different from we mathematicians -- forever defining new numbers, and types of numbers, and theorems about types of numbers, and even theorems about which theorems are true about types of numbers.

This left A1 with the reflection: it's not only that graduate school has made it impossible to talk with non-scholars. Graduate school has made it impossible to talk with anyone who is not a scholar in the same research discipline! Egads! We stand wrapped in our own elaborately specialized topics, islands of knowledge separated by an ocean of understanding that words cannot quite bridge; never mind trying to get to the layman's mainland.

Say that five times fast.

[Update: if you want more out-of-context amusement from A2, check out A1's twitter feed Oh, The Humanities!.]


This post's theme word is hypergolic, which describes two substances that spontaneously combust on contact with each other. The joint dinner of the Physics Association and the Sociology Club proved hypergolically argumentative.

Obstructive engineers

It is the end of the semester for undergraduates. Do you know what that means? Big project time! The engineers who share the building with us theorists are all very busy building robots. In the hallways.
It is a terrible fire obstruction. Also, it makes it difficult to access our offices. There are students, robots, and power tools in piles everywhere, including blocking our doors. Look at this doorway (the inlet in the wall on the right of this photo). I'm not joking about the power tools: there are students machining metal and welding, plugged into hallway outlets. Even after they have left, the hallway is a tripping hazard.
It must be that their professor -- who assigned these projects and did not provide enough lab space to construct them -- knows that they are working in the hallways. And implicitly condones it. We disadvantaged grad students resent this inconsiderate arrangement.


This post's theme word is feculent, "full of filth or waste matter." The corridor was feculent with undergraduates.

Stupidity in scientific research

I just read Martin Schwartz's note "The importance of stupidity in scientific research." In simple language, it explains how graduate school is different from all the preceding schooling. Anyone in graduate school would do well to go read it right now. Highlights:

Doing significant research is intrinsically hard... We can't be sure whether we're asking the right question... if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. ... Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown.

At the end, he notes that "reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help" which I think is a vast understatement. What else will keep you eagerly stupid, if not confidence and emotional resilience? -- especially since there is a whole world out there where the ex-graduate student can feel quite intelligent on a daily basis.

Part of what I've puzzled out in my graduate studies so far has been this: how do the professors do it? They seem to know which questions to ask in order to achieve meaningful answers and progress in research. Some of it is the buckshot approach: they have had the time to ask a hundred little questions, and the odds are in their favor: some of them hit a research target and became published papers. But also, they have an ineffable sense of which sorts of problems are good for research: this is summarized in the adjective "interesting," as in "that is an interesting research question" or "that is an interesting approach to this problem." I've learned that "interesting" is a key word, in bright flashing red letters, that indicates I'm doing Something Right with my research and should Keep It Up.

So while I curate my sense of academic stupidity, I'll continue to rely on my advisors' subtle (subconscious?) nudges and explicit advice.


This post's theme word is nescient, "lacking knowledge or awareness." The experts in the field are those most aware of their own nescience.

Meaningful additions to human knowledge

For the first time, I have read a reference, in a work written by another person, to my own research. It feels good. It feels like I've done something real and of significance. It feels like maybe I am actually attached at some wispy peripheral spoke to the great web of human knowledge.

I wish I could keep this feeling and recall it in times of grad-school-induced despair, in "dark places when all other lights go out." But this delight, and that despair, will fade as all things do, back to my baseline curiosity about the world. And yet now, for a moment, it is good.


This post's theme word: countervail, "to counterbalance or to neutralize."
This post is written like: Vladimir Nabokov.

Acceptance

Another acceptance, at a big conference this time. Whoo!


This post's theme word: convoke, "to call together for a meeting."

Git r done

This month feels like an aggregation of small and irksome tasks -- emails to act upon, articles to read, travel to arrange, deeds to follow-up, essays to write. I keep making ε-progress on the small tasks, context-switching too rapidly to accomplish something meaningful, juggling these many things while also trying to make large progress on my large task (research!). It takes a lot of brain space to keep so many things loaded in my RAM.

In the spirit of Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero, my rallying cry for the remainder of the month is thus: git r done! I aim to finish these tasks and clear all the irritation out of my mental cache.


This post's theme comic is from SMBC:

Academic blech

Some weeks, I just don't like graduate school. It's not the merry romp through fascinating ideas that I imagined; instead, it's a slog through the ugly drudgery of education. Learning, or trying to learn, or trying to force myself to try to learn, facts and methods about science that I find uninteresting, unmotivated, and useless.

It's enough to make me want to drop out, move home, and sell handmade pottery on Etsy.

Where's the magic? I know that I have to make the magic happen for myself. I've read, heard, and received enough advice to understand that. I just have to chant J.'s reminder over and over: "There are lots of cool problems out there to solve!" ... until I see that light, that magical research light, at the end of the drugde-lined tunnel.

I should have taken a break today, but I didn't, really. Oh well.


This post's theme word: roustabout, "a casual or unskilled laborer."

Awkward

I deal with a certain level of awkwardness every day. Huzzah for CS grad school. It has taught me that often, silence is the best response.

Just now, in the lab, with awkward coworker P.:

P: Hello, beautiful girl.
L: Hello, P.
P: (laughs at my curtness) You are a mathematician, no?
L: They tell me so.
P: Do you know anything about representation theory?
L: (apologetic shrug) No.

pause

P: You have very beautiful eyes, you know?
L: Thank you.
P: I am not trying to hit on you.
L: I know.
P: You do?
L: ...
P. hovers as if to say something, then thinks better of it and walks away.


This post's theme word: pretermit, "to let pass without mention," or "to suspend or to leave undone. "

Heraldry

While at the Cory Doctorow reading, a nearby audience member caught my attention and said, "Excuse me. Is that a Radcliffe rugby sweatshirt?" Indeed, it was, and it unfolded that he shared my alma mater and even my concentration, though he graduated before my time. It was nice to have my affiliation recognized, and share a few minutes of common-history-based socializing.


This post's featured word is a bit of a stretch, but I have been waiting for awhile to use it and I just want to take it off the queue. A paraprosdokian (from Greek "παρα-", meaning "beyond" and "προσδοκία", meaning "expectation") is a figure of speech in which the second part of a sentence or phrase is unexpected in a way that causes the audience to reframe the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax. For this reason, it is extremely popular among comedians and satirists.

Seminar skills

I gave a seminar today, entitled "An introduction to Kolmogorov complexity." The abstract I provided:

This week, I'll cover some introductory Kolmogorov complexity (including how to pronounce it!), definitions and applications to complexity theory,
including the relation of Kolmogorov complexity to the halting problem, and defining resource-bounded computational hierarchies from Kolmogorov
complexity. No background knowledge of Kolmogorov complexity is required; this seminar will be self-contained.

General consensus? It went very well. There was a lot of audience participation. Perhaps too much, since it got a bit derailed with people trying to explain each others' questions and answer them. Afterwards, more senior grad students offered me this advice:

• Never admit you are wrong. Never erase and edit what you've written on the board. I wrote one thing wrong and then 10 minutes were wasted fiddling with it. Relatedly,
• Don't answer all the questions. Make sure everyone has a basic understanding. If the question is about details that won't improve a basic understanding, postpone it until after the seminar is over.
• Proof by assertion. Related to the above two points. If there are too many details, or you don't quite remember how to prove it, or it's too hard, or whatever, then just say, "Obviously, ..." and move on before anyone derails you.
  
• Don't let audience members talk amongst themselves.
  

Obviously some of these should be applied judiciously. I'll have to work on these points, now that I seem to have the basics down.


This post's theme word: expatiate, "to speak or write at length" or "to move about freely."

Yuck, Harvard.

As a member of the distinguished alumni of a distinguished university, I enjoy frequent emails updating me on further distinguished awards and achievements obtained by my university, as well as increasingly desperate messages from increasingly important people entreating me to donate money to my alma mater.

I don't mind these emails. They are sometimes interesting, and otherwise easily ignored. But today I received an advertisement, which featured:

Back by demand. ... This new[ly reopened online] store now features youth sizes, so you can now get [insignia clothing] for your future Harvard athlete with his or her anticipated class year!

I am disgusted.

1. Harvard admissions are now so competitive that legacy children are by no means assured acceptance. (I do not know that they ever were, but there is a general belief that this is the case.) The alumni magazine features articles about current Harvard students, showcasing their amazing skills and genius, for the purpose of consoling irate Harvard parents whose children were not accepted.
2. No child deserves the familial pressure of bearing insignia clothing that he must fulfill. That is cruel.
3. Where is it socially acceptable to wear a "Harvard 2020" sweatshirt?
4. Yuck.
   

If you nonetheless desire some shamelessly branded clothing, you can obtain it and my disapproval here.


This post's theme word: churrigueresque, "baroque, lavish, over-the-top."