I am genuinely shocked, and more than a little disappointed.

As I’m leaving for a trip to Baltimore this afternoon, I decided to check out the games available for play on my iPod. I haven’t really taken advantage of the video upgrade since I replaced good ol’ Binky the Mini with Binky ][, and I figured this would be a good opportunity to see what advantages were now afforded me. I was very pleased to see that one of the games available was Sudoku, at a price equivalent to or less than the pencil-and-paper book I’d planned to pick up on the way to the airport. I snagged that and Tetris, connected the device, and began an exercise in frustration.

I searched and hunted and poked, and for the life of me I couldn’t find a way to get the games from my laptop to my iPod. I searched the help file to no avail and finally turned to Google. I found some instructions cobbled together on a message board somewhere, but even following those (which, in retrospect, were rather well-written) proved a hassle.

The process is automated, but the user has to tell the device to automate the process on first use. The checkbox initiating the automation is buried a couple of menus and tabs down, and there are absolutely no obvious pointers toward it. The tabs and menu interfaces themselves are non-standard within the iTunes interface, and are tiny to boot. Maybe it works better in the native Mac environment, but still I’m surprised it’s such a tricky and non-intuitive procedure on an Apple-fer-chrissakes product.

From a post commenting on a letter received from a reader:

This sounds like a dramatic story. I’m picturing some old guy, pierced with a poisoned shuriken thrown by an evil ninja assassin commissioned by the United Nations, beckoning his student over and telling her to look up a word in the dictionary before dying with a moan, “Remember … cholesterol … aaaaargh.”

It goes on, but you’ve got the idea already. She explains that she’s convinced that homosexuality is caused by diet, and that she’s been wandering the country, exposing satanic covens.

Fundamentally, she and I really don’t agree on much.

Snrk!

If you are giving a public presentation on a subject other than A Tale of Two Cities, and you are over the age of 17, and you quote the “It was the best of times…” line, you lose. You lose big. You lose hard.

This speaker just lost.

No more patronizing IHOP until Blair Funk and Eve Sandoval get a florid, public apology. The lesbian couple were recently kicked out of a Kansas City pancake joint for–shock! horror!–engaging in a public display of affection.

Because of our St. Patrick’s Day celebration, that’s why. Check out the Daily Telegraph’s write-up.

I’ve lately become intrigued by a notion I think I read about some time ago. I strongly seem to recall having seen references to research demonstrating how the immutable, eternal truths within oral cultures change drastically and rapidly, sometimes within the span of a single generation. That is to say, if you were to poll village elders about “the way things have always been done” every (say) fifteen years, you would be likely to get a significantly, often wholly, different story each time. But–and this is the fascinating bit–each time you asked you would get an affirmation that the story as it currently stands is the exact ancient tradition that had been passed down since time immemorable.

What sparked this current interest was my reading of an article about zombies, written (I think, it’s been a month or so) in the late 1980s or early ’90s. In that particular article, a poll of elder-types at various places in Haiti showed a startling difference in the conception of zombis that had been gathered in fieldwork from the 1940s. The writer of the later article attributed the difference to poor fieldwork by earlier researchers, but I’m skeptical. Unfortunately, the notion that interests me is so fuzzy that I can’t come up with a good research strategy.

(The more recent conceptualization, by the way, holds that the word zombi is more of a homonym than not, referring both to revitalized corpses and to one of the several human souls that, in voudun beliefs, comprise each individual. I believe what is now called the zombi is more or less what had been called the gros bon ange in earlier literature. According to the more current thinking, it is this non-corporeal element that can be conjured up and captured by malicious houngans, not the corpse itself.)

When you have to fill out one of those drop-down based Web forms, your state is always at the very tip-top. No scrolling, no hunting, and often enough it’s automatically selected for you.

From a book review in this week’s Science:

In 1889, the elderly and eminent French physiologist Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard announced that he had “rejuvenated” himself with injections of testicular extracts of dogs and guinea pigs.

I don’t care how rejuvenated I felt, I don’t think I’d go around sharing that sort of thing.

So I just got back from doing a library orientation for a group of freshman (er, first-year) honors students, and of course I started thinking back on my own undergraduate experience.

A few twists and turns later, inspired by some recent threads in the Chronicle of Higher Education forums, I started thinking about the special challenges facing the typical first-generation, working-class-background college student. And then I accidentally stabbed a finger in one of my unhealing wounds and started thinking of an undergrad classmate of mine.

Eric came from a very similar background, in a geographically near part of the state. His family had, if anything, even less social and financial capital than my own. Eric also had the same (like, the exact same) scholarship package I had, and we worked either the exact same or similar jobs while I knew him.

Due to his family situation, Eric was certainly receiving no more financial support from home than I was, and probably less.

I was always flat broke as an undergrad, as is typical. Eric, though, always gave the impression of being, if not flush, unworried.

He also spent more than I did on entertainment, on booze, on clothing, on his car, on…well, everything, actually. Like, significantly more. He was also able to adapt much more easily, to work his way into the…well, into the highest socio-economic circles represented at UAH, at least.

And I’ve never, never, never been able to fathom how he was able to do that, any of it. His chameleon abilities I’ve always been able to chalk up to some inner skills and drive he had but that I lacked, but I still can’t figure how he managed to have a nice wardrobe, an unembarrassing car, regular trips out of town for Mardi Gras and Spring Break, all that stuff.

I knew other people who lived as well as he did, but most of them came from families that (I later realized) were probably giving more support than my friends claimed. But Eric? A mystery, a puzzle. It’s always kind of annoyed me, and has honestly made me a little ashamed.

Picked up my new car today. Turns out the dealership gave much better loan terms than the bank, as long as I was willing to buy new and not used. So now I have a shiny blue 2007 Chevy Aveo. And a big, long car payment.