The festering possum corpse that was under the new house has been removed. This begs several questions — why did the landlords insist that it was a rat when in fact it was a much larger creature with a much longer ETD (estimated time of decomposition), why didn’t they just go ahead and remove it earlier if they could, and why does this make me even more stressed out than I was before?

Last night we went to our landlord’s place to sign the new lease. We drank wine, ate pizzelles, cheese, crackers, olives, and cookies and convinced them to remove the horrible smelling dead thing under the house before we move in. I played with the cutest softest bunny I’ve ever met, and she kept hopping up to me to lick my arm. They blasted “Love Shack” and danced. And this is why I enjoy having John and Pauline as landlords.

My roommate found a die in his pocket ostensibly from an undergrad party he attended earlier this weekend. As it turns out, it was not from the party, but for the sake of the following analysis we assume that it was. We then attempted to reverse-engineer an undergraduate/fratboy drinking game using this die. We regarded it as a sort of anthropological venture given an artifact from a specific site site, i.e. a UC Berkeley undergraduate party. As it turns out, the die only had the numbers 1, 2, and 3 on it, but it could be played with any 6-sided die if you take the number showing modulo 3.

The game is to be played by two people, A and B. They each roll the die to get a and b points for A and B respectively. If a > b then B must drink (a-b) shots of beer. If a < b then A must drink (b – a) shots of beer. If a = b then it is a draw and no beer will be drunk.

In the fratboy version of the game, play proceeds until one person passes out. In the UC Berkeley version, play proceeds until one person throws up. In the more tame home version of the game, play proceeds until one player reaches a total of 50 points — that player is the winner.

So I was biking down Channing this evening and had to slow down because a ten year old was trying to jump his skateboard up onto the divider that forces left turns for cars. As I edged my way past, he turned and twisted his face into a grimace.

“Hardcore!” he announced.

“Rock on!” I replied, and went on my way.

I parked my bike near the library this morning, masking my inability to make it up the hill by my need to return some books. As I walked across the brick and concrete landing to the main entrance, I passed two students on a bench commenting on a blind man making his way by fits and starts to the door. “Oops, there he goes,” giggled one. “He’ll make it in ok,” commented the other.
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On the way to the library today I stopped in the bathroom in O’Brien, one of the not-so-recently renovated engineering buildings. The style reminded me of the men’s room in 14N at MIT. Although much of the floor had been pasted over with a faux-tile laminate, there was still a patch of the old square-tile and grout floor that must have come with the original design. The original monochrome (blue in this case) pattern of speckled tile looked random to me because of the small patch, whereas the laminate I knew came in huge patterned sheets. I wonder if the workers who put in the original floor got to put in the design themselves, or if the patter was pre-specified by the architect.

Nowadays a tile floor like that would be fabricated off-site and just installed, the deisgn having been specifically chosen by the architect to change the way in which we interact with the bathroom floor or to provide a pleasing visual experience to the lavatory users. I imagine someone putting a Magic Eye stereogram in tiles on the floor so that when you’re sitting on the can and zoning out a 3D roll of toilet paper will pop up in your visual field. The idea is about as egregious as the furniture design for the Stata Center at MIT that Rodin rightfully abhors. I rather like the idea of someone taking the time to put in the floor by hand, tile after tile, and perhaps “misplacing” a blue square here and there to mix it up. It would be like writing a comment on the architecture. I’m sure there are all sorts of theoretical implications, but they’d take too much space to sort out.

This one is for you, Jenn — it takes 1387 steps to get from the corner of Shattuck and Dwight and Sacramento and Dwight. In case you were wondering and all.