I have a walk-in attic. That is, a standard door on the second floor opens up into the space over part of the first floor, and you can enter and walk around. Most of this space contains plywood flooring so you can walk on it. Other, clearly delineated parts, are unfinished, with the bare rafters and insulation open and visible. The unfinished spaces are separated from the walkable parts with 2×4 framing, such that no sane person would want to walk into the unfinished bits without a really good reason.

Lesson for the day: don’t let your mother-in-law wander the attic unattended.

Popularity: 2% [?]

One of the best things about the internet is when random larks you throw out into the æther get picked up by someone who uses them to build something neat.

Someone calling themselves BloodPromiser combed through deviantArt to build a tour of images from every country in the world. I’m both stunned and honored that two shots from my meager gallery were included. Especially given the quality of a lot of the other shots.

I guess maybe I should post some more.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I used to think I knew something about carving pumpkins. Evidently not. Now, why even bother.

And, if you happen to be a sex offender, enjoy your insane overregulation today.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Here is what I learned from the Olympics that just finished, in no particular order:

Photos from NBC, who gathered them from various sources (mostly Getty, AP and Reuters).

Popularity: 3% [?]

According to some useless rankings just released, Harvard is once again the top university in the US. It’s apparently been twelve years since they could make this dubious claim and, prior to that, they could make it only sporadically. I’m not sure what the administration thinks of such accolades, but having been enrolled as a student during one such year, I know the students don’t particularly care.

This particular year was early into the Clinton era, when grunge was trying to stomp out the memory of Big Hair and the last remnants of Nancy Regan-style anti-drug messages were getting more desperate. (Example: all of the phone books that year featured an ad on the back with a sign saying in thick, black, hand-painted letters “Mom and Dad, I do drugs”, with a kicker line below it saying something like “Real signs of drug use are not so easy to spot”.) Few students in that environment could have cared less what the U.S. News and World Report had to say about them.

Well, except the Harvard Lampoon, who staged a “we’re #1″-style rally on the grand steps of Harvard’s main library. A good number of the Harvard Band had been involved, so it was pretty festive, especially after the champagne started flowing. Like most Lampoon humor, it went way over the top, with speeches, massive posters and guys in mascot like costumes (one of them, for some reason, the “Mac Tonight” guy). The only reason I remember any of this, though, is that almost lost among a sea of huge banners with big “#1″s on them and messages like “Harvard: the Harvard of the U.S.”, was a small sign in thick, black, hand-painted letters saying “Mom and Dad, I do drugs”.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Having made the mistake of mentioning on a forum that “on my list of top 20 U.S. cities, L.A. wouldn’t even be on it”, I’m now being called to task to produce such a list. So be it. Note that this is all done in the context of tourism. For example, since I have family in LA that would be good reason why I would want to go there, but such considerations would be irrelevant to a random tourist.

If I had to order this list tomorrow, I’m sure the ordering would be different. Also, I’m stretching the concept of “city” a lot here to mean more like “region a tourist might visit”. To increase the degree of difficulty, I’ve tried to capture a wide range of places.

1. Chicago, IL
2. Sedonda, AZ
3. Las Vegas, NV
4. Washington, DC
5. Vail, CO (summer only)
6. Memphis, TN
7. Flagstaff, AZ (or, rather, the Grand Canyon)
8. New York, NY
9. Cedar City, UT (or, rather, Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks)
10. New Orleans, LA
11. Portland, OR
12. Seattle, WA
13. Bozeman, MT (and nearby Yellowstone National Park)
14. Farmington, NM (or, rather, Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon)
15. San Fransisco, CA
16. Kihei, HI (Maui)
17. Boston, MA
18. Captiva, FL
19. Taos, NM
20. San Diego, CA

Popularity: 3% [?]

I’ve made oblique references to my education before, but today calls for a slightly more specific recollection of one event that seemed to sum up what being at my college was like.

Graduation covers several days, with various events all over the place. Most are outside. In June. In Boston. So, everyone sweats a lot but pretends not to notice. The events are only tangentially related to the graduates, existing more to serve misplaced nostalgia and university status. (As an example, the main ceremony for undergraduates features a humorous Latin oration, for which the students are given are translation, but the spectators are not, allowing the university to look great as the students laugh at all the right moments.) Yet, completely as a side-effect, these events turn out to be pretty fun, even for someone who normally hates that kind of thing, because they connect people in a weird way. Generations reunite and connect with others. You reconnect with people you sort of lost track of along the way. One of them, maybe, goes on to become your wife. All these sort of funky people of all stripes gather and, importantly, drink. In the heat.

The event that prompts this post, though, came the day before the actual graduation, something called Class Day. This day is marked by gatherings that are decidedly less formal than others, with humorous speeches and so on. Weather was particularly good that day, sunny, but not too humid, so the largest of these events was well attended, though there were a scattering of empty seats in most rows. People tended to be in clumps within rows, couples, groups of friends, parents with their children, with stray seats between them. I sat next to my friend LG and we made whispered commentary on the events of the day (about which I remember nearly nothing). In front of us was this cute old guy, sitting alone, quietly watching the ceremonies. I didn’t pay him much mind.

As we were leaving, LG whispered to me, pointing to the old guy “Look.” I looked. I saw the same smiling old guy. She continued “that’s Solzhenitsyn.”

Something weird happens to you (or, at least, to me) in a situation like this. It’s a mental shift that feels in your brain a lot like a dolly zoom, that shot in a movie where the camera zooms out while approaching the actor, leaving the actor the same size in the frame, but bending the perspective on the the scenery. Looking again, I saw the same smiling old guy but, knowing he has seen and done more in his life than I ever will or would care to (soldier, labor camp, literary giant, Nobel Prize), he seemed different, disconnected from the rest of the crowd somehow. He might as well have had a halo.

It wasn’t quite a satori moment (I’ve only ever had one of those, a couple years earlier), but it crystallized a number of things for me. One was that you never really know who is around you; that crazy guy on the train may be the greatest mind the world has ever seen. Another was that enthusiastically realizing the innocuous person next to you had done, was doing or would do great things that you wouldn’t was a constant experience at school, and may be the entire point of the Ivy League. (As a very minor example, I point to LG’s near-supernatural ability to even recognize Solzhenitsyn. Could you do that?) And lastly, the realization that even if I gain worldwide fame, even if I change the world, no matter how many might know my name, eventually I’ll just be an old guy in a park.

I hope that I’m smiling as much as you were, Mr. Solzhenitsyn.

Popularity: 2% [?]