Fluffy Kittens Are Good (II)

Tengu would like to take this opportunity to remind you that he, too, is freakishly adorable.


Not much going on at the moment; it's been a very busy week, but not in what could be even broadly defined as an interesting way. I did have an interview with ExxonMobil earlier this week, but I'd like to hold off saying anything about that until I know if the super exciting possibility with them comes true.

So yes. Kittens.

CRUNCHsquish goes the cockroach.

So yeah. That was one of the highlights of my day. And by highlight, I actually mean OH GOD WHY. As I was leaving the geology building to head home after sequence stratigraphy, I decided to hit the bathroom. Except the doorway of the women's room in the basement was guarded by an enormous cockroach. It was at least the size of a cocker spaniel.

I was planning to just slink quietly away and use one of the restrooms on the upper floors, where the cockroaches have at least had the good taste to remain hidden. Instead, one of my mineralogy students popped up and informed me that I should squash it, since I was wearing real shoes and he was wearing moccasins. I made gagging noises to signal my disagreement. Part of this is because I'm too soft hearted to even squash most spiders, and part of it was because I couldn't begin to imagine what it would feel like to try to step on a bug that size - what if I only wounded it, and made it angry? What if it had a knife?

So then he told me to give him my shoe. Which I did. And he slammed it down on the cockroach. Twice. Then ground it in to the floor, at which point it made that awful CRUNCH noise that almost made me gag.

And then he threatened to wipe the bottom of my shoe off on my shirt sleeve before giving it back to me.

My students. They really know how to ingratiate themselves.

I ended up using one of the other bathrooms anyway, since I didn't want to go near the gross, squashed cockroach. Gah.

Other than that, decent enough day. Had my weekly meeting with Mary, discussed some basic isotope geochemistry for the PETM and I think I understand at least the broad strokes of it okay. I also asked her if there was much on the petrology of the basin, and it turns out there is basically nothing. I have to see if I still like thin sections by the time I'm done with this sedimentary petrology class, but it sounds like there might be a good opportunity for a project there if I can find money to have approximately a bajillion thin sections made. Also talked to her about masters versus PhD, since I've started wondering if I made a mistake just applying for an MS. Apparently that's something that can be changed pretty easily mid-stream, so I'm going to stop worrying about it until I settle on a project, at which point I'll see if the scope of that project is more suited to an MS or PhD.

The Inescapable Gravity Well Located In Mikael Blomkvist's Shorts

WARNING: Major, MAJOR spoilers ahead for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. At least the book. I have no idea what the movie is like.

I am not going to spoil the central mystery of the book, by the way. I actually enjoyed that part enough that it's what actually got me to finish the thing. No, my problem with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo begins and ends, like all things in that book, in Mikael Blomkvist's shorts.

Which is to say, I'm talking about his penis. Or more specifically, his penis and the inability of every female character in the book under the age of 50 to not immediately latch on to said organ and take it for a joy ride.

I'm not a prude. I swear. I read Laurel K. Hamilton, for gods' sake, at least until the killing stuff to sex ratio slipped into values of less than one. I don't have a problem with characters getting it on... as long as it actually makes sense and doesn't interfere with the story.

So it made sense when Blomkvist was banging his female friend/coworker/lady he was having an affair with that caused his divorce. Sure. I can dig that. She's a pretty cool character, actually.

Then he goes to the island, and one of the Vangers immediately squirms into his pants. Because she's apparently wanted to do that since she clapped eyes on him. Which I think is kind of a dumb reason to bang some guy you barely know, but hey, people do it all the time.

Then Blomkvist hooks up with Lisbeth, and that's about where I went WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK and just put my foot down. For starters, the sudden hop into Blomkvist's bed made absolutely no sense from the character Lisbeth had been built to be - at least in my opinion. Moreso, because in the beginning of the book she'd been the target of a very violent sexual assault, and that's something that didn't seem to even cross her mind once she encountered Blomkvist. Some very thin reasoning was given as to why she decided to ride his baloney pony, but frankly, I still think it's total crap.

Add to that the fact that as Blomkvist is described, he's not really anything all that remarkable in looks, is maybe a bit above average in the intelligence department, and it becomes more of a puzzle. If Blomkvist's beauty were at least described in creepy, cooing detail like that of D in the Vampire Hunter D Novels, I could at least buy everyone around wanting to bang him. Since hey, it apparently works that way if you're a half-vampire. Which Blomkvist manifestly isn't.

So, all I can conclude is that there's some sort of inescapable gravity well centered around Mikael Blomkvist's penis, and as soon as a woman gets within about two feet of him, she goes tumbling past the event horizon and can't escape.

And I further concluded this morning that if, during my fanfiction days, I had wrote anything remotely like a male character with a black hole in his shorts, the fan community would have cut me to shreds. And they wouldn't even have paused to sharpen their knives first, because sharpenin' is too good for dirty, lowdown scoundrels that write Mary Sue fanfiction.

The hell of it is, I really liked Lisbeth Salander as a character up until she started working with Blomkvist and slipped past the foreskin event horizon. And then to add insult to injury, not only does she bang him for no discernible reason, but she then decides that she's in love with him, for the thinnest of thin reasons. I almost threw the book across the room, except that it's not my book and my mommy raised me better than that.

I rather think the author's fallen into the gravity well, himself.

Also, the book once again continued the sad pattern that occurs in almost every action novel - if there's a small, cute animal, such as a cat, the evil killer will do something awful to it, just to show how awful and evil he is. Kind of like the way all psychopaths in the movies and on television are also avid scrapbookers.

I wanted to like the book, but considering the plot is caught between a horribly dead cat and a penis black hole, I just can't bring myself to recommend it.

It's hard to write with your brain full of snot.

I have a cold. In fact, the cold, the one that's been slowly burning its way through the geology department. It got Dave (my fellow TA) last week, and my advisor, and one of the nice ladies from the office. To put it lightly, I feel like poop on a stick.

I somehow survived the second field trip today. Don't ask me how. I think it's entirely up to the wonderfulness that is TA!Dave, who came along to help do the driving and ended up running most of the field trip. Which I guess works out, since he's done the field trip many more times than me. Joe was along yesterday and basically ran everything then, too. I only had a little bit to add about sedimentary rocks at that stop, but in all honest, from the perspective of mineralogy, sedimentary rocks are pretty damn boring. Today Joe was off seeing if he could salvage anything from his house... hopefully it's not as grim as it sounds, but it's hard to feel hope on the subject of wild fires. We actually caught a glimpse of the burn damage on the drive. The ridge we passed by was black with a few skeletal trees still clinging to it. The entire area looked like a shadow with clear skies overhead.

I think I may just not go in tomorrow, since I've only got a BS class in the later afternoon. And I've already canceled my office hours.

The real question is... will I get any writing done when my brain has been replaced with snot?

Also, I want to write a ranty thing about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - the book version that is. As a sneak preview, the intended title of the post will be: "The Inescapable Gravity Well Surrounding Mikael Bomkvist's Penis." Or something along that vein.

Field Trip Called on Account of Fire

Just in case you hadn't heard, bits of Boulder are on fire. That made today at school a little unpleasant. Campus isn't in any danger, but it was very hazy (I could barely see the Flatirons from the geology building) and everything smelled like smoke. My sinuses are feeling extremely irritated now.

The only mineralogy field trip for the semester was supposed to happen this week as well. I must say, canceling a field trip because of fire sounds a lot more butch than canceling it due to rain. Maybe next time we'll be able to ratchet it up even more and cancel it on account of alien invasion or giant panda attack.

People weren't talking about it that much, but the smoke is pretty oppressive, and fire that close to town is a little scary. At least one of the faculty has had his house burn down. He seemed to be taking it a lot better than I ever would, but at least he had his computer with him when everyone got evacuated. So he might have lost a lot of books and other prized possessions, but at least he didn't lose any research he was working on. Another person I met in the building today mentioned that he'd been evacuated from his house, and he hoped that it didn't end up burning down because he had all of the literature reprints he needed for an article he's been working on for 10 years in his office, and if that goes up in flames he'll pretty much just have to give up on it.

Maybe it's that both of these gentleman are a lot older than me, or that when you live out where you can see something approaching wilderness from your front door, you have to come to terms with the fact that sometimes nature is one mean mother. But man, they both seemed pretty calm and resigned.

This is one more thing that makes me glad to live in the suburbs, though. Stuff is just stuff, but I also have kitties to worry about.

Also: Phil Plait has pictures over at his blog.

The picture of the sunset freaks me out a little - it makes me think of the Hayman Fire, when at midday in south Denver the sky was orange and ash was raining down. Brrr.

Don't fuck with mother nature.

Dispatches From Grad School: Still Alive, But Dumber

I've now officially survived my second week of grad school. Well, technically yesterday was the official survival date, but I was in Colorado Springs for most of the day. And then when I got home, I decided that a round of Plants v. Zombies was more interesting than writing anything. I think Popcap has figured out a way to inject heroin directly into the eyeballs of anyone who plays its games, through the internet.

So after two weeks of grad school, how do I feel?

My panic has converted to stress, so that's good. Maybe.

This week I taught my first two labs. There wasn't really a whole lot of teaching involved this time, since it was mostly just going through the syllabus, then turning the students loose on an array of minerals so they could test the physical properties. I'm going to try to be incredibly nice about grading this one, I think; some physical properties can be pretty subjective (luster, for example) and I remember how much I loathed the physical properties lab as an undergrad because of it.

I'm also finding it interesting how a class as a hole can have a certain attitude with it. One of my lab sections was much more sociable than the other. One of them buckled down and got through all of the work a lot quicker, and there seemed to be a lot less questions. I'll be interested to see how things change once all of the students get to know each other better and hopefully become less shy.

Next week I'm going to have to start attending Mineralogy lectures regularly, I think. That's when lectures about the things I don't remember and was never that good at (eg: point groups) start up. It'll help me survive teaching lab, but I'm not all that thrilled about having three hours a week less to work with.

And time is the big, big thing. The last two weeks, there's been a couple of days each week where I haven't even left school until about 1900, because I've been in the library trying to pull articles. I'm hoping that will calm down soon, once I've got at least a decent library for the Bighorn Basin established. That time may ultimately be spent with thin sections instead, though, since I feel like my free time during the day (and when the petrology lab is free) is pretty limited.

I'm trying not to make myself crazy about Bighorn Basin, though. I had a good chat with my adviser on Friday about that. My big problem is that I want to feel like I'm doing something toward the project. And right now, I've got to face the reality that for the time being, all I can really do is read. A lot. And then some more. The Bighorn Basin is an area that's already had a lot of study, so I need a thorough understanding of what everyone else has done before I can really get to any questions that haven't already been answered. For me, that feels pretty frustrating, since reading doesn't really feel like work. But I just need to calm down, and do it, and not let my impatience get the better of me.

Maybe that's my first big lesson.

My classes are going all right. I dropped down to two, since the Surface Process Modeling class didn't sound entirely relevant, and two classes is already a pretty damn scary load. Which is another thing that takes getting used to. As an undergrad, I felt like I was seriously slacking if I wasn't taking at least four, if not five classes. Not so, here.

I've also been joking that in just two weeks of school, I'm already dumber. What I really mean is that I already feel like I know even less than I did before - college has always had that effect on me. The more classes I go to, the less I feel like I actually know.

Case in point would be the lab exercise we did for sequence stratigraphy on Friday. The professor gave us a log section to correlate. This is something I thought that I could do in my sleep, because I've been correlating logs for the last four years. So I went on my merry way, and royally screwed it up.

Most of the fields I've worked with span two, maybe three sections, which makes them three miles "long" at most. And because of the very small area a field covers, I tend to make a couple little assumptions - (1) the formations of interest should be present throughout the field, and (2) they should all be about the same thickness, unless you have a good reason to think you're working with something like channel sands. These little assumptions tend to be useful because sometimes you get logs that aren't of the best quality, and also mean that if you can't hunt down your formation (or something that just might be your formation if you turn your head and squint because Jesus, what were the loggers on?) then there's something pretty interesting going on.

This mindset basically made me mis-correlate a big part of the section on Friday. Because I wanted the various formations to be continuous, and about the same thickness. Which might work in a field, but not in a region, where pinch-outs and facies changes are the rule rather than the exception.

Scale. It's all about scale.

See, that's what I mean - I've only been in grad school for two weeks, and I already feel dumber.