elaine's strange little world

the album is incomplete, since cin has a bunch more pictures, but here are some photos from our trip a few months ago!

here they are!

quote from student:

"It is used when experimenters want to examine/analyze the cause of a cause. When the want to find what cause it & what caused the caused. A way to look at the steps that lead to a the cause which can lead to the way."

this was hand-written, and i've left all words and typos in. it doesn't even matter what question this was supposed to be answering, since it doesn't answer anything! i kinda like the conclusion, though. it can lead to the way! philosophically deep! it probably didn't help this child's score that i was grading at 2am...

i don't need to have the last word.

i'm not exceptionally political. for the majority of this election season, my feelings have been of annoyance and anger, with only mild moments of positives. i'm not a huge fan of obama, i like mccain even less, i hate palin, and i have no opinion on biden. but today, seeing the grinning people at my polling place, and the grinning people with the "i voted" sticker on campus, and hearing about record turnout and voter patience in the face of long lines and glitches, i'm happy to be a part of it. this is probably silly and sentimental, but it's a big day, whether i like any of the candidates or not, and i'm glad to have participated.

also, i was happy to vote no on AZ's version of the gay marriage amendment, prop 102. i have no idea how it's doing in the polls, though. i sincerely hope it fails, but the thing i'm really worried about is prop 8 in CA.

reposted from leora

1. Go here and choose any TWO of the 2/$44 bras.*
2. NEXT, go here and select ONE panty in white, ivory, buff, pink, or black (cotton). ONLY THESE COLORS (in cotton) WILL WORK.
3. NEXT, go to your shopping bag and ticky the box for offer codes. You'll go through a few intermediary pages before coming to the page to enter your offer codes. Fill out those pages...
4. FINALLY, enter these three offer codes:
FA814857 for a free bag with a $50 purchase
FA813789 for $10 off any bra
25PTY for $25 off any two bras, and a free panty

Your total after taxes and shipping will be around $20.

*Note: You can alternately select two bras from here at 2/$40, but you'll need to add a filler item to get to the $50. Order an extra panty or find something in the clearance section.

for me, the total, with taxes and shipping, came to $19.45. that's hard to beat.

ETA: It seems like the free bag offer is no longer working, but the 2nd and 3rd offers, for $ off bras, are still good.

brief update: dad is feeling better, i didn't have to drive to sf. my back is feeling better, as well. didn't get an x-ray, since it felt significantly better by monday, and i was pretty sure i hadn't injured a rib or a kidney. it still hurts to do much more than walking or laying down, but sitting is less bad, and it bugs me much less overall.

on a positive note, i cooked for my friends yesterday (turkey things, like chicken things that cin knows and loves but with turkey, and potatoes with dill and garlic) and everything was yummy! success!

I was reading about the Hadron Collider and stumbled upon a wikipedia article on particles called strangelets. There are many things that amused me in that article, but the best section was one titled, dramatically, "Dangers." The first paragraph reads:

"If the strange matter hypothesis is correct and a strangelet comes in contact with a lump of ordinary matter such as Earth, it could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter. This "ice-nine" disaster scenario is as follows: one strangelet hits a nucleus, catalyzing its immediate conversion to strange matter. This liberates energy, producing a larger, more stable strangelet, which in turn hits another nucleus, catalyzing its conversion to strange matter. In the end, all the nuclei of all the atoms of Earth are converted, and Earth is reduced to a hot, large lump of strange matter."

Rest assured, however -- we don't know if the strange matter hypothesis is actually correct, and evidence is leaning towards not. Still, I giggled for a little while, especially at the fact that the Earth might be reduced to a hot large lump of strange matter.

yes, it is in fact 4:20am. this is because thunderstorms knocked out power in (apparently) many parts of tucson this evening, and my complex didn't have electricity from about 8:30 to about 2:00am. this was rather inconvenient, given that i wanted to watch swimming and the men's gymnastics all-around competition. so, the logical solution was to go to bed, be awoken by all the lights turning on at 2 (oops!), and get up to watch nbc's primetime replay, amusingly brought to us by ambien cr (a sleep medication).

i have many thoughts about the games themselves, most of them too hyper or too whiny or too pedestrian to want to write down, so i will instead share more amusing quotes from the NY Times, which has become my main source for articles about the olympics.

this entire article, about the completely amazing and sometimes distressing bodies of the olympic athletes is pretty great throughout, but several parts made me actually giggle out loud:

"Here are the gnomish female gymnasts, seemingly more compact than ever, more muscularly developed and yet at the same time troublingly arrested, to judge from the lack of secondary sexual characteristics like breasts.

Here is Dara Torres, the 41-year-old swimmer with the blister-pack abs and the padded deltoids, her stupendous physique attained, she says, through Herculean training, and now unquestionably resembling that of a cover boy for Men’s Health."

"Even in the classical world, the range of forms at the Games was broad enough to encompass lean bodies suited to running, wiry wrestlers with bantam bodies, refrigerator-size hulks capable of feats like lifting a young ox (and then consuming it later: certain athletes at the ancient Games gained laurels, while others won all they could eat). A mosaic floor in a fourth-century villa at the Piazza Armerina in Sicily depicts three female athletes playing some sort of ball game and wearing bandeau bikinis. One of them looks distinctly like that Diana of beach volleyball, Kerri Walsh."

"What the Games also frankly accommodate is a taste for the spectacle of straining young bodies, an appeal that was not lost on the ancients. The crowds at the early Games, according to the historian Nigel Spivey, were as excited by the “boys with slim waists, broad shoulders, neatly proud buttocks and springy thighs” as they were by the lofty ideal of the Games."

oh, dear. springy thighs? neatly proud buttocks? what does that actually mean, and do i really want to know? i'm sad though, that while the article briefly mentioned michael phelps, it didn't really talk about male swimmers who, to me, have the ideal male body type. also, cin, this picture (from the accompanying slide show) is for you. :)

this article about china winning all the diving golds thus far isn't really funny in and of itself. however, i find it fairly awesome that the picture accompanying it is not, in fact, of divers, but of tennis player roger federer. huh? this may be corrected, so sorry if it's not funny by the time some of you read it, but i'm very entertained.

ok, it is time to actually sleep. man, i'm on a weird schedule these days!

i'm keenly aware today of how much i both love and hate the fact that i have several friends who i will forever have a small crush on. love, because it's great to know such awesome people, and it's somewhat comforting to know guys like them do, in fact exist. hate, because, well, it's annoying, given that i'm not dating any of them. heh.

this entry brought to you by the letters S, O, R, and D and the number 1.

Cin and I are back in athens, after s lovely few days on gorgeous Santorini! It's a beautiful island, with very blue water, gorgeous cliff views, black-sand (or, really, black-pebble) beaches, and lots of antiquities. Cin and I spent our only full day there on the beach, bobbing around in the rather strong waves and laying under an umbrella, reading. We also spent a lot of time wandering about Fira, poking around the shops, taking in the views, and eating yummy Greek food. Best lamb ever! Also, best baklava ever. Yum! Yesterday, we had a half-day before our boat, so we went to the small and very informative museum of prehistoric Thera (another name for Santorini), then took a bus to Akrotiri. Sadly, the excavations have been closed for a few years since something collapsed and killed a visitor, so the only thing left to do was to hike, in our sandals and skirts, to the Red Beach. A bit of an adventure, but we seem to have made it ok! Then, we got back to Fira and immediately hopped on a bus to the Volcan Wine Museum, a really cool little museum on wine-making on Santorini. There was an audio tour and some entertaining robotic figures, and we got to taste yummy wines! I even bought a bottle to take back -- relatively inexpensive, yummy white wine! Then we went back to Fira and were taken to the ferry, where I, miraculously, didn't get sea-sick, despite how terribly rocky it was for some of the time.

Today, we discovered that we lost our guide book at some point yesterday -- not sure when or where, we had it on Santorini, so it got lost between then and now. Made a little trip in search of a new one, which was frustrating but successful in the end. Eventually, we made our way to the National Archaeological Museum, which has all sorts of cool, excavated stuff -- very cool, though we were somewhat overwhelmed by the end. Vases and statues of various gods and humans are very cool, but after 10 rooms of each, they all start to look the same. Still, pretty awesome.

Tomorrow, we're off to Delphi for the day, and then we fly to Israel at 2am! Meep! Should be a fun day, though!