Sad times in the southwest

George Carlin died yesterday. He was old beyond his 71 years, and his death is not a tragedy, but it's nonetheless sad. He was an early hero of mine - when I was 11 I got a copy of his album "Parental Advisory Warning" on cassette tape, and spent a long time at first wondering a) why the warning was so big and b) where the title was. It was one of my first introductions to absurdist, irreverent humor, and the acknowledgment that the world is crazy and no one know what's going on. Plus it had great lines like "You never see a really big tall fat Chinese guy with red hair." I never have. Then he was Rufus in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, an important movie of my childhood and I'm sure many of yours. He was funny and smart and one of the rare few great stand-up comics. A toast to George.

I've been in Santa Fe, New Mexico for a week now, for a workshop on computational modeling. We're housed in glorified dorms on the campus of St. John's College. The workshop is good, I'm learning stuff and making progress on my research project, which is nice. On Saturday five of us rented a car and explored the some pretty cool areas, such as Bandalier National Monument and the Valle Grande caldera. I forgot my camera at home, so I don't have many pictures now, but I will once the other people with cameras get around to posting all of them. Meanwhile, there's a water tower just up the hill from the dorms, labeled with loads of graffitti including "Long live water tower wednesdays!" Indeed. Here's a view from the top:

And then it's fight for old Wesleyan

I got an fundraising email from my alma mater, Wesleyan University (whose students were recently treated to a way better commencement speaker than we got in my day - see below), which started:

Dear #Nickname##,

Here's a lesson. When asking for money, one should check one's code to make sure that it works as expected before soliciting thousands of potential donors for cash.

GObama

Thank fucking god.